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Building a vertically integrated Saas business from day 1 w/ Sean Stavropoulos @ Boulevard
Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.
ABOUT SEAN STAVROPOULOSSean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.
Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’
And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.
- Sean Stavropolous
**ABOUT BOULEVARDBoulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.
What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.
Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.
SHOW NOTES:- Boulevard’s early days & why it became a vertically integrated SaaS product from the start (2:08)
- The problem discovery phase & expanding Boulevard’s feature scope (4:18)
- How Sean navigated which opportunities to pursue early on (9:49)
- Frameworks for deciding which features to prioritize while considering the financial impact (13:30)
- Tools for validating the ideal customer persona (16:51)
- Balancing between being realistic & optimistic regarding your product (17:47)
- Navigating both feature release & customer growth milestones (20:13)
- Sean’s experience fundraising as an eng leader for a vertically integrated SaaS platform (22:00)
- Strategies for convincing investors that your product is worth investing in (26:01)
- Identify & seek advice from experts who can help grow your product (29:28)
- The impact of COVID on Boulevard & how they navigated its challenges (32:11)
- Rapid fire questions (39:00)
- (book) The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
- (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?
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By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.
ABOUT SEAN STAVROPOULOSSean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.
Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’
And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.
- Sean Stavropolous
**ABOUT BOULEVARDBoulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.
What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.
Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.
SHOW NOTES:- Boulevard’s early days & why it became a vertically integrated SaaS product from the start (2:08)
- The problem discovery phase & expanding Boulevard’s feature scope (4:18)
- How Sean navigated which opportunities to pursue early on (9:49)
- Frameworks for deciding which features to prioritize while considering the financial impact (13:30)
- Tools for validating the ideal customer persona (16:51)
- Balancing between being realistic & optimistic regarding your product (17:47)
- Navigating both feature release & customer growth milestones (20:13)
- Sean’s experience fundraising as an eng leader for a vertically integrated SaaS platform (22:00)
- Strategies for convincing investors that your product is worth investing in (26:01)
- Identify & seek advice from experts who can help grow your product (29:28)
- The impact of COVID on Boulevard & how they navigated its challenges (32:11)
- Rapid fire questions (39:00)
- (book) The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
- (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?