Practical Founders Podcast

Raj Bhaskar is a successful two-time practical software founder with one exit. In 2000, he started his first software company, VisualHOMES, to provide a comprehensive financial management software to public housing agencies. With no outside funding, the business grew to serve 65 regional providers serving 2 million residents before Yardi Systems acquired the company in 2010.  After he left Yardi t...

Vince Hsieh is a two-time entrepreneur who has started, grown, and sold two industrial tech companies that included software and either an RFID or GPS device in the solutions. His second venture, Geoforce, raised a non-dilutive funding round to accelerate global growth before being successfully acquired by private equity investors LLR Partners in 2019. Their royalty-based funding round allowed Geo...

Bill Spruill had a successful sales and executive career with two exits before he and his cofounder struck out on their own in the location verification market serving financial and e-commerce companies. Sales grew slowly for several years as they scraped by and kept going. Eventually, they pivoted the company to focus on identity verification and know-your-customer (KYC) with a new approach, and...

Troy Munson has been a successful enterprise SaaS sales rep for several years, but he wanted more control over his life—and eventual financial independence. So he launched his own small startup on the side. He learned a lot and sold it before launching his second side gig software company, which he sold for a little bit more.  He started his third side-gig startup,  Dimmo , in 2023 to allow enterp...

Wes Bush is CEO of  ProductLed , a coaching and education company that has helped almost 500 serious SaaS founders to succeed with product-led growth strategies, tactics, and execution. These include freemium products and free trials, where the product itself creates the awareness, engagement, and enthusiasm to buy before any human intervention (aka "the required sales demo"). Wes has written two...

Michael McAllister is the founder and former CEO of The CE Shop , the leading provider of pre-licensing and continuing education for real estate professionals in the U.S. Michael started The CE Shop in 2005 by distributing existing training materials from a continuing education provider. They quickly created their own online education solution and proceeded to expand with specific content and comp...

Last year I interviewed  three-time software founder Matt Watson  on this podcast about his successful practical founder journeys. Matt leveraged offshore software development talent in his last two SaaS companies to staff up quickly and grow efficiently. His top developers and designers were offshore in the Philippines, but they weren't one-off contractors or difficult-to-manage outsourced agenci...

Eric Dill was a successful mortgage broker in Sydney, Australia, who struggled with the same painful problem as every other broker: manually checking with multiple banks to validate and price mortgages for homeowners. Eric and his good friend Angus Keatinge resolved to create a software product to solve this complicated and chronic problem. Quickli was launched in late 2021 and it immediately gain...

Guy Rubin is the co-founder and CEO of  ebsta , a revenue intelligence platform that works with Salesforce and Hubspot to automatically analyze existing data to improve sales performance. Started in London in 2012, ebsta found success in the early days of the Salesforce marketplace and addon economy as a data tool integrated with customer emails.  ebsta has since become a complete revenue intellig...

Stuart Draper founded  Stukent , an innovative ed-tech company that provides simulated internships for business students. Stukent started by focusing on high-quality digital marketing education for colleges and universities using up-to-date digital textbooks and content. They then added a simulation system for students to practice their digital marketing skills. Stukent grew steadily with less tha...

John Stewart created and sold an engineering services business, then grew a Salesforce integration services company before building some early software products. One of their software experiments allowed Salesforce customers to see and interact with their customer data on a map. When customers paid for it and revenue grew, he and his co-founder wound down services and focused on their mapping prod...

Landon Taylor created two successful digital marketing services businesses before starting a product-powered business with recurring revenues. His first agency drove traffic to its customers, which led to his second business, Best Company, which produced qualified leads for large home services businesses through its bestcompany.com consumer review site.  Their work in consumer reviews led them to...

Kyle York was the Chief Revenue Officer of Dyn, a bootstrapped cloud infrastructure that he helped grow and sell to Oracle for over $600 million. He then led product strategy and acquisitions in Oracle's cloud infrastructure group before going out on his own to invest in SaaS startups and help them grow.  York IE is both an advisory firm with tech-enabled services to help early-stage B2B SaaS comp...

Mike Kovarik is the founder and former CEO of Attribytes, a software company he started, grew, and successfully sold in just over five years. Mike was a data analytics leader at large food distributors, where he discovered a chronic challenge with low-quality product data in their massive e-commerce systems. He quit his job, built a product with a friend, and his former employer became his first c...

Brothers David and Chris Sinkinson attended Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, when David learned of the problems maintaining the blue emergency phones on campus. He proposed a location-aware mobile safety app, so Chris built it himself, and it worked great.  AppArmor grew steadily to become the most popular university mobile safety platform in Canada and the US, and over 250 universities use...

Dan Balcauski is the founder and principal consultant of  Product Tranquility , a SaaS pricing consultancy. Dan shares the core building blocks of SaaS pricing, including customer segments, value, competition, and positioning strategy. Dan also describes the common mistakes in pricing and the importance of having structured pricing conversations with customers. In this expert interview, Dan shares...

Rob Farrow was an experienced marketing executive and his wife Christina Farrow was a successful professional wedding planner. They discovered there was no good software for wedding planner pros, so they decided to build software themselves. They invested their savings, built a loyal team, and started Aisle Planner to serve other wedding planner pros with a complete solution to power their busines...

Krista Morgan started her first tech company by raising funding and trying to grow very fast. When the company faced a big issue and failed, she learned that big funding was more of a problem than a help in the growth and wind-down processes. Krista is now CEO and General Partner of  Stage Fund , an early-stage private equity fund that makes control acquisitions of venture-funded SaaS companies th...

Ian Manners was a successful consultant for pharmaceutical companies in the US when he discovered a major problem that needed a software solution. Big pharma companies provide financial assistance funding for patients who require their drugs but struggle with high costs, but these funds are difficult to access and manage for patients and healthcare providers.  Ian and his cofounder created  Vivor...

Dave Lambert and the team at Right Side Capital Management are the most active venture capital investors, having invested in over 2,000 startups since 2009. Right Side Capital is a "pre-VC" institutional investor that operates very differently from traditional VCs: investing when SaaS companies have just a little revenue using a submission form on their website, then responding quickly and making...

Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of  Showit , a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a scrappy software business that made inexpensive photo-presenting and sharing tools for photographers. The Showit company was created when Todd took one of the...

Erin Fletter had a long career in the restaurant business before starting an after-school enrichment program to teach kids how to cook at her daughters' school in 2011. Her cooking program became popular, and she improved and expanded it to become a paid program called  Sticky Fingers Cooking . Soon, she had a sizable business with over 100 chef-instructor employees who conducted engaging classes...

In this second of two episodes, Practical Founders Podcast host Greg Head discusses the next five important things venture capital investors don't tell new SaaS startup founders. Greg emphasizes that VCs invest in very few businesses and seek big wins. He highlights the importance of understanding the game of venture capital funding and the alternatives available to SaaS founders. Check out last w...

In this episode, Practical Founders Podcast host Greg Head discusses the most important things venture capital investors don't tell new SaaS startup founders. He emphasizes that VCs invest in very few businesses and are looking for big wins. Greg highlights the importance of understanding the game of venture capital funding and the alternatives available to SaaS founders. Quote from Greg Head, Hos...

Mike Trasatti spent 10 years in the automotive dealer software business before he found an auto dealer in Iowa who had built is own complete software system. They partnered up in 2008, and Mike became the first CEO of the spinout software company, DealerBuilt. DealerBuilt  grew slowly as a bootstrapped startup in a market full of large incumbent competitors. They had a better approach to managing...