Practical Founders Podcast

Raju Patel founded eShow over 25 years ago after building a speaker portal for a magazine company and realizing he had a repeatable software product. What began as a one-man shop in suburban Chicago evolved into a robust event-management platform serving associations that needed complex, multi-module functionality. His business grew steadily as he delivered registration, booth management, speaker...

Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of ScaleGrid , left a decade-long engineering career at Microsoft to solve a painful database operations problem he had lived firsthand. After early missteps selling to enterprises, he shifted to helping developers manage MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres on the cloud, bootstrapping the business from scratch. ScaleGrid grew steadily through product depth, technical support,...

Gaurav Bhasin is the founder and managing director of Allied Advisers , an M&A advisory firm whose principals have completed over 100 sell-side transactions for software and tech founders. After two decades in investment banking and tech M&A, Gaurav is a sell-side advisor to B2B software founders who have built successful businesses and want to explore selling their companies. Allied Advisers typi...

Natalie Barbu is the founder and CEO of  Rella , a SaaS platform built to streamline collaboration and workflows for social media teams and agencies. She began as a YouTube creator, grew a following of over 300,000, and then identified the fragmentation of the creator tools market — which led her to build Rella 1.0.  With some small seed funding, the first Rella version focused on content creators...

In this episode, the founder of Practical Founders, Greg Head, shares the most powerful insights from over 165 podcast interviews and working with 40+ bootstrapped SaaS founders in his peer groups. Greg breaks down the common but less obvious traits he sees in practical founders who are quietly building valuable software companies without big VC funding. Greg shares how frugality and managed risk-...

Darryl Pahl is the co-founder of DFnet , a Seattle-based company providing clinical trial data management software and services. Along with his wife and co-founder, Lisa Ondrejcek, Darryl started the company more than 20 years ago after careers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. They built DFnet around long-term client relationships in global health and clinical research. The company runs...

Vincent Serpico , veteran CTO and founder of Founders Workshop, is on the front lines of the AI revolution in 2025, reshaping software development and business operations. With more than 30 years of experience building software apps, Vincent is now dedicating himself full-time to AI coaching and workshops for teams and companies to create high-leverage impact quickly. Vincent shares how practical...

Brett Gilliland, founder of  Elite Entrepreneurs , joins Greg to discuss how they help ambitious founders navigate the tough leadership journey from $1M to $10M in revenue. Brett shares how co-creating a clear, practical Purpose, Values, and Mission form the foundation of scalable organizations. He explains why moving from founder-led chaos to aligned leadership teams is the critical step that sep...

Praveen Ghanta, founder of  Fraction  and former CEO of HiddenLevers, shares how he turned his experience scaling a bootstrapped SaaS company into a fast-growing fractional talent marketplace. After HiddenLevers reached $8M in ARR and sold for over $100M, he realized that senior fractional engineers were the secret to delivering efficiently without expensive full-time hires. Fraction now serves ov...

Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski are the co-founders of Fletch , a positioning strategy firm for B2B SaaS companies. They started Fletch after observing that most founders often confuse positioning with copywriting and marketing, and built their business by helping SaaS leaders make the tough, strategic choices about who they serve and how they win. Over the last three years, Anthony and Rob have c...

Dave Yuan is the founder of Tidemark , an active growth equity investor focusing on vertical SaaS companies with outsized advantages that can become "control points" in their markets and grow very big. Dave and Tidemark have invested in successful vertical software companies like Toast, ServiceTitan, Jane, and CCC. Tidemark hosts  its annual  VSaaS Collective Live Event, featuring experienced spea...

Dr. Matthew Jones is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in working with co-founders to help manage critical conflicts that threaten their success. He is the author of the book, "The Cofounder Effect: How to Diagnose, Fix, and Scale Healthy Communication for Startup Success." Matt has worked with hundreds of bootstrapped and VC-funded co-founder teams to help them repair and manage th...

Yuval Selik is co-founder and CEO of  Promomash , a software platform and managed service for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands to manage their trade promotions and field marketing activities. Yuval is a former CPG founder who encountered the expensive, complex, and crucial process of managing trade promotions with stores and distributors. Promomash launched in 2015 to serve mid-sized CPG compa...

Vince Mayfield is cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents , a co-parenting app for communication and coordination used by divorced parents raising children. Cofounder Stephen Nixon was a lawyer with family cases who recognized the need for a secure, unalterable communication record to improve co-parenting and family harmony.  He pitched a development company owned by Vince and Louis Erickson to build...

Alan Miegel is co-founder and CEO of BetterComp , a modern compensation management platform for larger companies to manage compensation datasets to set market-priced salary benchmarks. Alan and his cofounders started the company in 2019 with founder funding, then raised angel funding as convertible debt from his friends in the tech industry. They shipped their first "minimum sellable product" in 2...

Zvi Band is co-founder and former CEO of Contactually, which was CRM software for real estate and other relationship-oriented professionals. Contactually was founded in 2011 with initial funding and support from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley. In the next five years, they raised a total of $15.5 million from institutional VC investors. Contactually grew to about $10 million in revenue before growt...

Shoanak (Sean) Mallapurkar is the founder and CEO of Recruit CRM , a complete CRM and business management system for global staffing companies and recruiting agencies. He started the company in 2017 with his father, a technical expert who had experience as a senior executive in large staffing companies. Sean handled customer-facing jobs in sales, success, and product management, and his Dad manage...

Jesse Burrell is the CEO and co-founder of BatchService, now known as BatchData , a real-time data and API platform designed for prop-tech startups and enterprises requiring massive and current housing data. Jesse was a real estate investor who needed better data to target his marketing efforts. BatchService was launched in 2018 with data brokering and subsequently built additional tools and apps....

Brian Forbis is the CEO and president of Blood Bank Computer Systems, Inc. (BBCS), a business his mother created in the 1980s to serve the non-profit blood bank industry in the US. Brian started in sales, then transitioned to run development, and assumed the role of CEO in 2019 when he bought the company.  BBCS rebuilt its entire mission-critical ERP software as a modern cloud solution over the la...

Chris Brisson is the CEO and co-founder of Salesmsg, a conversational two-way texting platform that enables businesses to engage with their customers through opt-in SMS. When his first software company stalled, he shut it down and developed the Salesmsg product for a different SMS use case that served his previous customers.  Salesmsg now provides secure SMS texting across all departments in the c...

Tracy Larson is President and CEO of WeSuite, a vertical sales automation platform designed for larger integrators who sell complete security systems for commercial and residential real estate. Tracy and the cofounders were in the security systems business before launching a sales software company for this market in 2008.  WeSuite is now a comprehensive solution that addresses the complex industry...

Henry Valentino is the founder and CEO of EConnect , a leading provider of facial recognition software for casinos and stadiums, ensuring venue security and compliance. He founded EConnect in 2009 and pivoted several times before focusing on a security platform utilizing AI for casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Econnect platform offers facial recognition surveillance software that integrat...

Josh Turley is CEO of RTA Fleet Management , a fleet management software company that his grandfather started in the 1980's and ran as a small family business for decades. Then Josh's father ran the business until 2015, never growing this slow, old-school business past $2 million in revenues. Josh had worked in the business before, but in 2016, Josh bought the business, to over as CEO and slowly b...

Sameer Narkar is the founder and CEO of Konnect Insights , a global SaaS company based in Mumbai that provides an omnichannel customer experience platform to consumer brands in 100 countries. Sameer created Konnect Insights in 2015 to help customer service teams respond to customers who mention their brands on social media. The product and company have expanded from a slow start working through ma...

Chris Erler was co-founder and COO of ComX, a sales pipeline generation for mid-market B2B companies in Germany and Europe. Chris and two other founders started the company in 2018 to conduct turnkey modern digital marketing and lead generation solutions for traditional German companies. As a tech-enabled service that combines technology, data, and people-powered solutions, ComX delivers proven re...