Practical Founders Podcast

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, a leading SEO software for marketers created in 2007 that grew out of the active followers of Rand's popular SEOmoz blog. Moz grew quickly to over $30 million in revenue by 2013, having raised $30 million in venture capital investment. When growth slowed in 2014, the company faced many internal difficulties and Rand dealt with mental health challenges, causing him to step down as CEO.

Rand left Moz in 2018 and later that year published his popular book about his difficult startup journey, "Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World." He described in detail the growth of Moz and the exciting growth years, but he also revealed the painful challenges he and the company faced in their later years. In this podcast discussion, he is frank about the pitfalls and brutal realities of big VC funding for founders and the companies they created.

Rand created his second software company, SparkToro, in 2018 with an approach that was opposite to the funding, growth, and staffing he used at Moz. We discuss the benefits of practical funding and sustainable profits to create healthy software businesses that support the goals of founders, employees, customers, and investors.

Learn more at PracticalFounders.com.

Nathan Hirsch, co-founder of FreeUp, shares his journey of building and selling the company and his other business adventures. FreeUp provides clients with pre-vetted virtual assistants (VAs) and freelancers in an online marketplace.

Nathan discusses the importance of niching down and targeting specific industries, such as e-commerce, to attract clients. He also highlights the combination of software and people in FreeUp's operations, with software handling recruitment and billing and people assisting with matching and customer service.

FreeUp achieved success through organic marketing strategies, niche focus, and great customer service. The business grew to $12 million in revenue in four years before being acquired by The HOTH in 2019.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Ian Brodie, the co-founder and CEO of Levanta, shares his journey of building a successful SaaS company in the affiliate marketing space.

Levanta is an affiliate marketing platform for Amazon sellers, enabling them to connect with content creators, publishers, and influencers to drive sales and traffic to their Amazon storefronts. The company has experienced rapid growth, with over 700 brands and 3,000 affiliates on the platform. Ian discusses the challenges and opportunities of the affiliate marketing industry, working with Amazon, and the importance of building credibility and confidence as a young founder.

He also discusses his experience of successful selling his previous company, Grovia, an affiliate partner recruiting services company that was acquired by Acceleration Partners in 2022.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Gregg Scoresby founded CampusLogic in Phoenix in 2021 to provide software for colleges and universities in the US to make it easier for students to apply for college loans and grants online. Initially self-funded, CampusLogic raised investment and grew faster, becoming a leading provider of software to universities with $50 million in revenue. In 2022, CampusLogic was acquired by Ellucian for an undisclosed amount.

In 2023, Gregg launched PHX Ventures, a $27 million seed-funded supporting early-stage B2B SaaS founders in Phoenix, Arizona. Unlike the traditional VC approach, PHX Ventures supports startups that are growing fast with a capital-efficient approach. PHX Ventures also helps the larger software community in Phoenix with educational events and networks to connect founders, talent, experts, and capital.

In this expert episode, Gregg answers common questions about when practical venture funding can be useful for founders and what it means to be capital efficient.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Esben Friis-Jensen and his cofounder, Sebastian Seilund, teamed up in 2021 to create Userflow, a no-code user onboarding product for SaaS companies. This week, it was announced that Userflow has been acquired by Beamer, a maker of product user engagement software that also used product-led growth strategies just like Userflow.

Userflow is profitable and growing, with over $4 million in ARR, 750 customers, and just three employees with no outside funding. Techcrunch reported that Userflow was acquired in a $60 million deal, supported by Beamer investors Camber Partners and other investors.

Esben told the Userflow story on the Practical Founders Podcast in episode 42 last year. This is an update about the recent acquisition and his thinking behind selling the company.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Antony Ceravolo is a successful two-time startup founder from Adelaide, South Australia. He started his career in investment banking but left in 2002 to start a DVD rental business in London that raised funding from big VCs and Amazon. It grew into Lovefilm.com, which was later acquired by Amazon in 2011 to become part of their movie streaming service.

He moved back to Adelaide and started Sine in 2013 to help schools, businesses, and large office buildings manage guest sign-ins more securely using iPads at their front desks. They also started tracking visiting contractors and vendors with their mobile app, allowing automatic check-ins and tracking for operations managers.

Sine grew quickly with global customers and large deals, eventually growing to 100 employees, mostly in Adelaide, with no VC funding or institutional investors. Sine was acquired by Honeywell in 2020 and became a critical product in their property management technology suite.

Antony speaks openly about the benefits and challenges of working with institutional investors and why he avoided raising VC funding with Sine.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Raj Khera is an experienced practical SaaS founder who has used search engine optimization (SEO) to grow businesses very efficiently. Now he coaches entrepreneurs at MoreBusiness on how to use organic SEO as a core part of their marketing engine.

In this expert interview, I ask Raj to explain the basics of SEO for SaaS founders, what tools and techniques are most useful, and how SaaS founders can make the most of SEO investments to drive revenue faster.

SEO for Bootstrapped SaaS Topics Discussed on this Podcast

• How he used SEO to grow his previous software companies
• The basic concepts of search engine optimization (SEO) for SaaS founders
• Simple tactics for identifying search terms that would create qualified traffic
• His favorite tactic for gaining authority from Google for your organic website content
• Which search engine marketing tools are most useful to maximize your time and investment
• The simple ROI math that founders can use to measure their investment return with SEO

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Justin Hewett started in the software business as a territory sales manager for an education software company in Utah. The company grew and Justin eventually led the sales team as the senior executive. When the company was acquired by PE investors, Justin moved on in 2020 and thought about ideas for a new software business to serve K-12 schools in the US.

Flashlight Learning helps K-12 teachers in the US to quickly assess the speaking and writing progress of multilingual students who are learning English. The software captures data for teachers to provide students with improved feedback to accelerate language development.

Flashlight Learning grew 300% in 2023 to $4 million in revenue, with a growing team and an outsourced development partner. Justin raised some angel funding to get started and move fast, but they are expecting to be profitable this year with continued growth.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Morgan Katz is the founder and CEO of Ticketnology. Morgan was an enthusiastic athlete with a degree in sports management who started her career in ticket sales for sports teams and front-line venue management. Morgan saw how companies with season tickets had difficulty managing their digital tickets after COVID, so she started her own company to solve it with a software solution.

Ticketnology is a fast-growing leader in the new category of season ticket management software. Started with a mix of hands-on concierge services and a software solution, Ticketnology is now a complete platform that helps season ticket holders manage and distribute tickets to maximize the value of their season ticket investment.

Ticketnology is a bootstrapped and profitable software company with just over $2 million in revenue, four full-time employees, and an outsourced development team. They doubled revenues this year and expect to double each year for the next few years. Morgan is a member of a Practical Founders Peer Group.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Stephanie Betters was a practicing Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery and an active real estate investor when her frustration with disparate real estate CRM and marketing solutions hit a boiling point. Salesforce and a development partner proposed a project so expensive that Stephanie hung up and decided to build the solution herself. She learned to code and build a useful real estate CRM on Salesforce in three months.

Her business thrived with her comprehensive software. Other real estate investors heard about her software and encouraged her to launch the company in 2019 and start selling the software, now called Left Main REI. Word spread in the industry and hundreds of real estate investors signed up in the first year, transforming their businesses.

In just over three years, Left Main REI now has hundreds of customers, 20 employees, and nearly $3 million in annual recurring revenue. The company has been bootstrapped and profitable from the first day. Stephanie has a big vision for the company and loves her founder/CEO role; she will no longer be practicing as a Nurse Practitioner as of 2022.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.