Practical Founders Podcast

Robin Alex worked in a digital marketing agency in Dallas when he discovered their small business clients struggled to nurture and follow up with their website leads. In 2018, Robin and two developers prototyped a marketing automation and CRM software that could help other agencies solve this problem for their clients. They pitched the product and got a great response. They built their first product and HighLevel grew quickly.

HighLevel grew fast as word of mouth and referrals spread in the agency community. HighLevel is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform for agencies that serve small businesses. With marketing automation, CRM, and payment tools, HighLevel has an innovative "white-label" platform that their agency customers rebrand to deliver custom solutions to their customers.

HighLevel has over 60,000 agency customers, over 3 million small business users, and over 700 remote employees. HighLevel is adding 30-50 employees a month, yet they are still "moving fast and breaking things" to move fast and serve their agency customers. The founders took a practical growth equity round of funding in 2021 from PeakEquity.

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Mike Roberts is the founder and CEO of SpyFu, a leading competitive research tool for marketers and entrepreneurs with over 15,000 paid customers and hundreds of thousands of free users. SpyFu was launched in 2006 and has been a profitable and bootstrapped business for almost 18 years.

Mike is a happy founder who splits his time between leading the business and his personal pursuits, which include surfing and spending time with his family. He is still passionate about innovation, search marketing technologies, big data and AI, and creating new ways to help smaller businesses succeed.

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Raution Jaiswal grew up in India and then worked in management roles at large companies in the US before he discovered a problem experienced by small insurance agencies. He validated the problem, built an early solution, and didn't quit his full-time job in 2018 until he had 50 paying customers.

InsuredMine provides an all-in-one sales CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing automation software for independent insurance agencies in the US. InsuredMine helps improve and automate marketing, sales, and service to help insurance agencies sell more, serve customers better, and become more profitable. It also integrates with many popular agency management systems (AMS).

The bootstrapped company is growing up quickly with almost 60 employees, a leadership team, and a growing reputation. In addition to over 1,000 small insurance agency customers, InsuredMine is now being used by some of the largest agency organizations in the US.

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Kelly Mann was a CPA and auditor for 15 years before leaving her employer to start her own CPA firm focused on 401K benefits audits. She discovered a need to automate this process, validated the market with other CPAs, and created the first AuditMiner software.

Unfortunately, Kelly was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer just before launch and started aggressive chemotherapy immediately. After a year of treatment, AuditMiner was launched, and CPA firms lined up to buy it.

With her treatments and surgeries behind her, Kelly is now CEO of a fast-growing and profitable SaaS software company with 15 remote employees, hundreds of customers, lots of publicity, and suitors interested in buying the company.

Kelly openly shares her personal journey with cancer and how she thinks differently about running a software company than most founders.

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Praveen Ghanta graduated from MIT with computer science and economics degrees and worked for various financial services companies after trying his hand at a software startup. Working in his spare time, he built a product and recruited a cofounder to help sell it. After trying to sell it to different types of financial services companies, they finally found a valuable use case with individual wealth managers to help them sell new clients. They quit their jobs and launched HiddenLevers.

HiddenLevers was as stock portfolio and financial risk management software that helped financial advisors show their clients the potential impact of outside invents on their investments. Despite being bootstrapped and profitable, the company grew steadily to $8M ARR with 25 employees by selling to larger wealth management companies and solving bigger problems.

Orion Advisor Solutions acquired the company in March 2021 for a strategic valuation of 16X revenues. HiddenLevers is now Orion Risk Intelligence. After helping the acquisition transition, Praveen started Fraction to help software companies hire senior developers looking for ongoing fractional engagements.

Oliver Low worked for Microsoft and then MySpace in London before creating a successful digital agency in 2010 with two friends. Their agency grew fast and was profitable, so they invested in building software apps to solve problems that they faced helping big brands promote on the web. One of those products, Platform360, turned into a real SaaS product business which became their focus in 2013.

Platform360 was a programmatic ad platform for large brands to manage digital advertising in the changing digital privacy environment. They grew quickly with extreme effort and no outside funding, but eventually decided to sell the Platform360 business in 2018 for a modest exit.

Oliver is a savvy and practical "0 to 1" entrepreneur and business builder. He now runs Tiny Studio, the venture builder inside Tiny.com. Tiny is one of the largest "buy and hold" acquirers of bootstrapped and profitable SaaS companies, continuing to run those companies as independent and sustainable businesses.

We talk at length about what we are both seeing in the big wave of successful practical software companies that are starting, growing, and thriving without any VC funding.

Bootstrapped SaaS Topics Discussed on This Podcast with Oliver Low

• Why Oliver created a digital agency in 2007 after working at Microsoft and Myspace
• How they built and grew a programmatic ad-tech platform without outside funding
• Why they chose to sell the company at a challenging time rather than raise big VC funding
• How Tiny.com works as a holding company that acquires bootstrapped SaaS businesses and holds them long-term as independent companies
• What Oliver sees in the world of practical SaaS founders from his global perspective
• Why he started a venture studio inside Tiny.com to incubate practical SaaS businesses

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

In this expert interview, Vik Thapar of Cypress Growth Capital explains revenue-based financing (RBF) and how it can be very useful for practical SaaS founders. In the last 10 years, Vik and the Cypress team have funded over 50 SaaS and tech-enabled services businesses that have steady recurring revenues and predictable customer acquisition approaches.

Revenue-based financing is a form of non-dilutive funding that is paid back as a fixed percentage of cash receipts until the investment is paid off.

Unlike raising funding from VC or other equity investors, founders with $3M-$10M ARR can use RBF as an efficient option to accelerate growth and increase the value of their companies without losing control or diluting their equity.

Royalty-Based Funding Topics Discussed on This Podcast

• What is royalty-based financing and how is it different than other non-dilutive funding options like venture debt or equity funding from VCs?
• When is royalty-based financing useful for practical founders by company size and capital needs?
• When doesn't royalty-based financing make sense for founders?
• What time frame is typical for founders to use funding to grow and then exit at a much higher price?
• What has happened in the royalty-based financing industry in the last 10 years?
• What's the typical process and timeline for a founder to receive funding and start paying it back?

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Bryan Clayton is the co-founder and CEO of Greenpal, a leading on-demand marketplace of lawn care services for homeowners across the US. With a team of 25 remote employees, they help 300,000 homeowners connect with 35,000 landscape service providers.

Greenpal is an "overnight success that took 10 years" while the founding team learned to build a software product and recruit homeowners and services pros to the marketplace. It grew slowly at first as they learned and made mistakes, but they didn't stop and started to expand regionally. Greenpal has no outside funding.

Bootstrapped Marketplace Topics Discussed on This Podcast

• How long it took the founders to get the Greenpal marketplace going in his home city before adding other cities and going national
• Why they are laser-focused on one segment of this massive landscape maintenance industry
• How a two-sided marketplace business is different than a B2B SaaS business
• Why they resisted taking outside investment for all the years it took them to become profitable
• Why he has "fun" working so hard for so long to make GreenPal successful

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Ben Murray is a former SaaS CFO and finance professional who helps SaaS founders understand the basics of SaaS accounting, finance, and metrics for their growing businesses. Ben has a popular blog and podcast with free educational resources to learn advanced SaaS metrics, learn finance best practices, and hear stories from other founders.

In this expert interview, I ask Ben all the questions that I hear from startup founders and SaaS CEOs about finance and accounting operations. Ben is very experienced and very practical about doing the simple practices that help software companies grow efficiently and confidently.

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Wissam Tabbara is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple software startups in Seattle since 2009 when he left Microsoft where he was a software development manager. He led multiple startup technology teams and now is an experienced CEO and business builder. In 2021 he founded Truebase, a B2B prospecting platform for revenue teams using the power of generative AI accelerates the prospecting journey.

Wissam steps back to assess his startup adventures more objectively and shares his biggest learnings around leveraging the latest technologies, funding, and acquisitions, and staying ahead of giant tech companies in the same space. He talks about his biggest learning as a technical founder: how the revenue and growth side of the business is where "all the action is at" when creating a valuable software company.

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.