Practical Founders Podcast

Matthew Bullis grew up in a mud-brick hut with no running water on a small island off South Korea, was adopted to the US at 11 speaking no English. After a dot-com near-miss, he took over his brother's struggling concrete-pumping software — down to about $20,000 a year — for 90% of the company. He taught himself to code and rebuilt it from scratch. From 2016, Bullis built RapidWorks into the opera...

Nick Olsen is the Head of AI Innovation at Mainsail Partners , where he works hands-on with 25 scaling vertical SaaS companies helping them adopt AI in engineering and product. Before joining Mainsail, Nick spent 20 years helping build ResMan from a 3-person startup into a scaled software company serving the multifamily property management market. Today, Nick leads a team of engineers who embed di...

Paul Hoeper founded InvoiceASAP after spotting a simple but painful problem in 2009: home service businesses couldn't easily create invoices or collect payments from the field using mobile devices. He started in New Orleans, launched during the earliest days of mobile apps, and built one of the first mobile invoicing products integrated with both Square and Clover. He also suffered through several...

Jerry Alderman is the co-founder and CEO of Valkre Solutions , a SaaS platform built specifically for key account managers who oversee the largest and most strategic customers in global B2B companies. After careers in engineering, sales, leadership, entrepreneurship, and customer value consulting, Jerry discovered that key account managers were still managing critical customer relationships with s...

TJ Joosten is the co-founder of RevFixr , a pricing and monetization consultancy that helps SaaS companies improve pricing, packaging, and revenue growth. Before starting RevFixr, TJ spent a decade building and selling software, helping early-stage companies find customers, refine product-market fit, and navigate pricing decisions from small startup deals to multi-million-dollar enterprise contrac...

Rupert Mayer is the founder of IPfolio , a vertical SaaS platform built for corporate intellectual property teams to manage patents, trademarks, renewals, and innovation workflows. Originally from Austria, Rupert stumbled into IP software while helping a patent law firm solve Y2K risks, then moved to Silicon Valley to build a modern cloud-based product on Salesforce for smaller in-house IP teams....

Eric Ries is the entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup , whose work helped software founders validate ideas faster and build companies without making huge bets upfront. After years helping startups, large companies, and governments apply Lean Startup principles, Eric built the Long-Term Stock Exchange and turned his attention to a bigger question: Why do so many successful companies lose the...

Marc Sanderson is the founder and CEO of INNERGY , but he didn't start as a software founder. After earning his MBA and searching for a company to buy, he and partner Walter Wilkie acquired a small architectural woodworking business in Minnesota in 1997. Running that business revealed a deep operational problem: there was no software built for how custom woodworking shops actually operated. So Mar...

Blakely Graham co-founded TaskRay , a project management and customer onboarding platform built inside the Salesforce ecosystem. After years working with Salesforce implementations and operations teams, she and co-founder Eric Wu saw a major gap between closing deals and successfully onboarding customers. They bootstrapped the company from a simple Kanban-style workflow app into a growing SaaS bus...

Andy Alsop didn't start The Receptionist —he bought a small iPad-based visitor management app in 2013 for $250K and turned it into a real SaaS business. What began as a simple front-desk check-in tool evolved into a full visitor management system used across offices, schools, and manufacturing sites. Over a decade, Andy grew the company to 5,500 customers across 8,000 locations and more than $7M i...

Sharon Nouh built ProSpend , a spend management SaaS platform for mid-market companies, after seeing firsthand how broken expense processes were in corporate travel. Starting with an expense tool, focused on her home market in Australia, she bootstrapped the company and landed a global enterprise as her first customer with a simple but powerful product vision. Over 10 years, she expanded ProSpend...

Perry Rosenbloom, founder of LaunchBay , previously built and sold Brighter Vision before starting his second SaaS company focused on onboarding. After running hundreds of onboarding processes per month, he saw a consistent problem: what happens after the sale is messy, manual, and often ignored. LaunchBay helps SaaS and professional services teams manage customer onboarding with structured workfl...

Dina Nagalla built EmpowerMX over more than a decade to digitize aircraft maintenance for major airlines like American, Southwest, and United. Starting from deep domain experience inside aviation IT, he tackled a complex, high-stakes problem—replacing paper-based processes with a full execution system that improves efficiency and compliance.  The company grew into a mid–double digit SaaS business...

Chad Ingram is the founder of Distro , an AI recruiting software company that helps mid-market and enterprise companies automate candidate screening, vetting, ranking, and scheduling. He previously built Jump, a venture-backed customer engagement software company, through a stressful growth and sale process that taught him painful lessons about fundraising, control, and acquisition pressure.    Di...

Joseph Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Supademo , a fast-growing SaaS company solving a common pain: quickly creating new product demos. In just two and a half years, they built a modern, AI-powered solution that dramatically simplifies how teams showcase software. Supademo has reached $3M ARR in 2.5 years and is growing more than 100% annually with a freemium model. The product enables teams to...

Tanner Kovacevich of Lighter Capital joins Greg Head to explain how non-dilutive financing works for practical SaaS founders. Since 2010, Lighter Capital has funded hundreds of recurring-revenue SaaS companies that want growth capital without giving up ownership or board control. Tanner shares discuss how non-dilutive financing fits companies with $1M–$5M ARR that are growing steadily but don't wa...

Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of QuestionPro , a bootstrapped survey and customer-experience research software platform they have been building for more than 25 years. Based in the Bay Area, Vivek has grown the company globally without venture capital, staying deeply involved in product and running the business as both CEO and de-facto chief product officer. As QuestionPro crossed $10M th...

Juan Ignacio Garcia Braschi is a partner at L40 , a boutique SaaS M&A advisory firm with offices in Madrid, Lisbon, and Miami. After two decades in banking, private equity, and operating roles, including serving as CFO of ride-hailing company Cabify, he now helps SaaS founders sell companies typically valued between $20M and $200M. L40 works primarily with B2B SaaS companies doing $5M–$50M ARR, mo...

Simon Swords founded Fundipedia after starting in a backyard shed building bespoke software. Originally a custom development shop, his firm built a data governance platform for major buy-side asset managers including HSBC, Barclays, and Legal & General. Over time, Fundipedia evolved into a high-retention enterprise SaaS platform with strong net revenue retention and Rule of 40 performance. Simon n...

Steve Reynolds didn't start TripBam to disrupt the global hotel industry—he simply noticed that corporations weren't getting the discounts they negotiated, and no one was checking. After 30 years in travel technology, he saw a broken system hiding in plain sight. What began in 2013 as a consumer hotel re-shopping tool quickly revealed a much bigger enterprise opportunity. When a corporate client o...

Keith Shields is co-founder and CEO of Designli , a custom software development company that's helped non-technical founders build over 200 digital products in 13 years. After struggling to build apps through unreliable agencies in his own early startup, Keith focused on fixing the many painful experiences most founders have when hiring software development teams. Designli operates as a complete o...

Will Caldwell started Snap after his first real estate software startup fizzled, pivoting from agent tools to regulated compliance data. He discovered lenders were required to buy hazard and flood certifications, and realized this was a "painkiller" product. He built Snap as a data and analytics platform for real estate and mortgage underwriting. Snap grew from a single California compliance produ...

Luigi Mallardo joined Woffu as an early angel investor and later became CRO, helping founder Miguel Fresneda shape a practical SaaS growth path. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Woffu has built a modern cloud-based time and attendance platform for SMEs and mid-market companies, replacing legacy tools and spreadsheets with a focused, mobile-first workforce solution. Starting from just €2K MRR, Luigi led...

Jordon Comstock is founder and CEO of BoomCloud, a vertical SaaS company serving dental practices with patient membership software. He started the company scrappy and bootstrapped, with no outside funding, after years in the dental industry managing his family's dental lab business. BoomCloud now does about $3M in ARR with roughly 600 dental practices and an 11-person team. The company helps denti...

Deepak Sindwani is Managing Partner at Wavecrest Growth Partners , an active growth equity firm backing bootstrapped and lightly funded SaaS founders. They work with practical founders who've built profitable businesses to $5–$20M ARR and want help growing without VC pressure or losing control. Wavecrest invests in vertical SaaS companies growing 30–60% annually, typically profitable or breakeven....