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 the first app. They came together to cofound TalkingParents in 2012. Stephen worked with judges, courts, and lawyers to build awareness and get their first customers. The app records and stores all communications between co-parents, including chats, message, phone calls, and calendars. The company started growing and eventually became profitable as word spread, they charged more for the product, and the app improved.

TalkingParents is now a profitable and growing company with well over $10 million in revenue, 65 employees, 100,000 paying customers, and 500,000 people using the app. They are self-funded with no outside funding.

Quote from Vince Mayfield, cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents

"The company you are when you have 5 million in revenue and maybe 40 people, it's not the same company you are when you've got 20 million in revenue and say 80 people. It's not. You've got to iterate and change.

"And you've got to have the stamina for that. You've got to be willing to put in the effort and do that. Yeah, exactly. There's no shortcuts to this.

"I love it when people tell me, I've got an idea and I'm going to start up and it's going to go viral overnight. And my first thought is bulls--t. It's not going to happen that way.

"It's much harder than everybody thinks. You hear about the overnight success, but what you don't see is the 10-year grind that it took to get there. And the sacrifice and delayed gratification that goes along."

Links

• Vince Mayfield on LinkedIn
• TalkingParents on LinkedIn
• TalkingParent website

The Practical Founders Podcast

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel.

Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com.