Practical Founders Podcast

Craig Letton quit his corporate sales job in 2011 to take over his parents' small printing business in Scotland. It was his first time running a business and he learned hard business lessons quickly. Eventually, he discovered a huge need for custom-printed promotional materials by frontline salespeople in the global drinks and beverage industry. He sold their printing equipment to focus just on the software to solve this tricky problem for those salespeople, marketing departments, and regional printers.

Running the business for revenue and profit with no outside funding, Craig grew the MRM Global business slowly with big brands in the alcoholic beverage industry all over Europe. They worked hard and stayed frugal and started to grow. Then COVID hit and revenues evaporated. Their survival tactics helped them keep going and even grow faster when restrictions were lifted. They raised some practical funding from BGF Capital in the UK to stay alive during COVID lockdowns and expand quickly after that.

MRM Global is now a fast-growing marketing technology software company serving many of the largest global beverage brands in 20 different countries. This is a great example of a "small niche vertical market" with a very specific problem presenting a massive opportunity to create a large and valuable company. It's also the story of grit, perseverance, frugality, and intense customer focus creating a huge opportunity for growth.

In this episode, Craig explains:

• Why he took over his parents' small printing business in Scotland after he left a corporate sales job
• How he uncovered a major opportunity in the global drinks (beer and liquor) industry for salespeople to easily create custom, branded promotional materials for their customers using software
• How the small company grew profitably and steadily until COVID shut down restaurants and hotels, taking their revenue to zero
• What they did to survive the COVID shutdown and how he defines entrepreneurial resilience
• Why he decided to take some practical funding to survive the downturn and prepare for growth
• Why he thinks this business will be a £100 million business someday

Read the text transcript of this interview and find other Practical Founder Podcast episodes at practicalfounders.com.

Jeff Matlow is a serial entrepreneur and a crazy triathlete and a long-distance runner who found a way to put those passions together in a software startup that grew up fast. He saw an opportunity to create a better registration experience for endurance events like 5Ks, marathons, and triathlons.

In 2008, he sold the big deal to USA Triathlon and set out to build the website and registration platform he envisioned. The company I Am Athlete (now called imATHLETE) went live with their platform and started selling to hundreds, then thousands, of other endurance event managers all over the US. The company grew without big funding and the solution expanded to manage payments, social media promotion, and more.

In 2019 Jeff sold the company to a major endurance event company. Jeff shares the challenges in growing this company and the learnings from trying to grow with a strategic partnership. Like running a marathon or climbing Everest, the journey is hard and how you approach every day is critical.

In this episode, Jeff explains:

• How his experience as a marathoner and triathlete let him to the opportunity to create a better event registration platform
• How he sold his first big customer before he had a product and a website
• Why he didn't raise any outside money until I Am Athlete was an established market leader
• Why growing a company is like climbing Everest or running a marathon
• His experience selling the company and what worked and didn't work
• How the modern software startup and investor game is like his first career finding new bands in the music business

Read the full transcript and find other episodes of the Practical Founders Podcast at practicalfounders.com.

Howard Gottlieb created and sold several businesses before starting a school fundraising website in 2003 called Easy Fundraising Ideas. It grew into the most popular Internet website for school fundraisers. He experimented with many business models and ideas while the fundraising industry still wasn't changing or growing.

In 2012, Howard started Read-a-Thon as a literacy-based fundraising platform that helped students raise money while boosting education. Their easy platform and simple fundraising approach created amazing results. The Read-a-Thon business grew steadily and profitably without any outside funding.

Their relentless focus on elementary school fundraising and their culture of continuous improvement helped them grow faster and create a much bigger impact. In 2022, Read-a-Thon helped thousands of schools and students to raise over $30 million in donations. Their platform has tracked over 30 billion reading minutes by students who have used the platform to earn donations.

In this episode, Howard explains:

• How Read-a-Thon has impacted literacy in the US in a material way as they reach more schools, students, and donors
• Why they changed their business model from pledge-based to one-time fundraising
• How he experimented with many business models in school fundraising before starting Read-a-Thon
• Why he didn't sell the company to a private equity buyer that had an offer on the table
• The power of specialized focus on elementary school fundraising vs. being a generalized platform for any type of fundraising
• Why he is constantly testing, improving, and optimizing everything inside the business and in the customer experience
• What he learned from the previous 6 companies he created and sold before starting Read-a-Thon

For more details and the full interview transcript, go to practicalfounders.com/podcast.

Scott Pickard didn't know he was embarking on a 15-year software entrepreneurial journey when he signed on to manage a horse veterinary practice in Calgary, Canada. But they had built some internal software to help them manage their large practice that drastically improved their business results. Soon other horse vets wanted their HVMS software and the Business Infusions software business was created with Scott leading the small team.

Business Infusions grew steadily without big budgets, big funding, or a big team since 2006. Equine (horse) veterinary and hospital practices all over the world heard about their software and lined up to buy it. Now Business Infusions powers over 400 sizable veterinary practices all over the world. The company was acquired for cash by Merit Holdings in 2021 to run as a standalone company to expand its solutions to continue serving its clients.

Scott and his dedicated team weren't in a glamorous industry with fancy modern technology, SaaS best practices, and big funding. They just served their loyal veterinarian customers and built a reputation in their tight-knit community for dedication, support, and focus on equine vets who have specialized needs.

In this episode, Scott explains:

• How their popular HVMS software was first created for internal use by a successful horse veterinary practice in Calgary, Canada
• How they grew steadily and efficiently with vet-to-vet referrals by their existing customers
• Challenges with board members who know their industry but weren't savvy about the software business
• How Business Infusions grew to be the global market leader for large equine veterinary practices around the world
• The process of how they were acquired in 2021 and what happened to the company after that

Find out more and read the full interview transcript at practicalfounders.com.

Josh Cameron and three university friends started a scrappy software company in Brisbane Australia just after graduating. They had run the popular college bar where they discovered there was no simple software solution to track, onboard, and schedule hourly employees. They started Tanda in 2012 and it grew into a successful workforce management software company in Australia —without any outside funding.

The four founders moved to Chicago in 2019 to expand their North American business. Their product worked fine in the US, but sales, marketing, and operations all had to be rebuilt, which took years to figure out. They acquired the Workforce company and took on that brand and domain name outside of Australia.

Now Workforce.com is a leading workforce management software company that helps improve time and labor management for shift and hourly workforces. Their 130 employees serve 6,000 customers in 80 countries with employee scheduling, time and attendance, employee engagement, analytics, and automated compliance.

In this episode, Josh explains:

• How he and his university friends chose to start a scrappy software startup instead of taking big jobs after they graduated
• How they bootstrapped and grew their company in Brisbane in Australia for 5 years before the founders moved to the US and settled in Chicago to expand their North American business
• How they compete and win in a crowded marketplace against bigger competitors
• The growing pains they experienced growing from a small team in Australia to a global organization with 130 employees with offices in three countries
• The benefits of being frugal, growing at a steady pace, and not taking big VC funding
• Why they bought a 100-year old company to get the Workforce.com domain name and brand

Check out practicalfounders.com to read the full transcript from this episode.

Joe Griffin recently left his job of 8 years as co-CEO of ClearVoice, a company that he and co-founder Jay Swanson started in 2014 out of their digital marketing agency business in Phoenix, Arizona. ClearVoice was acquired by Fiverr in 2019 and has been operating as an independent subsidiary since then. Fiverr is now a large public company with a global reach.

ClearVoice was created in the fast-changing web search marketing industry in 2014 out of the need from larger companies for high-quality content to drive their organic website traffic. Joe and Jay previously ran their search marketing agency iAcquire and used profits to self-fund the first ClearVoice platform. They eventually raised a small amount of practical outside funding, including a seed funding round of $1.5M and venture debt of $2M.

ClearVoice is now a leading platform for brands to hire industry-savvy experts to write useful content that is branded for their communities and customers. Thousands of brands and over 10,000 industry specialist creators use ClearVoice to drive organic marketing efforts with high-quality content.

In this episode, Joe explains:

• How he had created and sold previous internet marketing agencies and technologies before creating ClearVoice
• The difficult transition of creating and funding the ClearVoice marketplace out of an existing services business
• The acquisition by Fiverr before they went public in 2019 and how they operated as an independent subsidiary after that
• Their practical funding with self-funding from their services business, a little angel funding, a small $1.5M seed investment round, and then venture debt before being acquired
• How he led ClearVoice with a co-CEO and how they worked on all big decisions together

Find all the episodes and resources at practicalfounders.com.

John Francis is a general partner at Stout Street Capital, a venture capital fund based in Denver, Colorado. Stout Street has made 70 small seed and pre-seed investments in software startups outside the big tech centers in North America.

Unlike big Silicon Valley VCs, almost half of Stout Street's investments are in practical startups that have reasonable valuations, sustainable growth models, and won't need more outside investment before they exit.

In this in-depth interview with a "practical funder," John explains the ROI math of professional venture investors and reveals how they think about investing. John also has great insights on how founders should think about raising money, or not, in the first place.

In this episode, John explains:

• The basic investment math that a seed-stage venture fund manager needs to deliver the expected return to their "limited partner" investors
• What kind of investment valuation and eventual exit outcomes are required to raise institutional capital
• When a practical founder shouldn't raise VC funding and how they should be thinking about taking outside investment capital
• How "practical VC investing" is different than traditional moonshot VC investing and why founders need to be clear about which kind of funding they want
• What's happening in valuation for investment and acquisitions in 2022 compared to 2021

Find all the Practical Founders Podcast episodes at practicalfounders.com.

Zach Moreno was a full-stack developer and coding instructor in Northern California in 2015 when he discovered audio podcasts. There wasn't a remote podcast software for recording high-quality audio over the Internet, so he decided to create one. He and his childhood friend Rock Felder started working on their product and startup idea while they still had full-time jobs, with Zach as the CEO and CTO.

Now Squadcast is one of the leading podcast recording studio platforms used by tens of thousands of audio podcasters all over the world, including me. Squadcast has since added high-quality video recording for YouTubers and other creators to easily generate professional-quality video content without using a professional studio.

With 15 employees and over 10,000 customers, Squadcast is growing steadily and scaling up, but they are still a bootstrapped company with no outside investors. This is unusual in such a fast-growing market like podcasting tools and also because the co-founders live in the heart of big VC funding—Silicon Valley in Northern California.

In this episode, Zach explains:

• How they prototyped their idea and launched their MVP at a podcasting conference before it was really ready
• Why his timing was perfect to solve this problem with the explosion in podcasting and technical changes in browsers
• How he gets advice, support, and insights as a first-time CEO by reading books, meeting with VCs, and participating in a bootstrapped accelerator called TinySeed
• How he thinks about bootstrapping in Silicon Valley and why he hasn't raised outside funding so far
• What he thinks the future looks like for audio and video content creators and how the market will change as it matures

Find other Practical Founders Podcast episodes and get my weekly email at practicalfounders.com.

Karl Swannie was a geographer working in the scenic city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, when he started analyzing social media data based on location. He quickly saw there was valuable real-time information that was not being used, so he started Echosec Systems to find a practical use for those insights.

After several years of experiments and hard startup lessons learned, Echosec finally shifted from being an inexpensive news/insights tool to a comprehensive threat intelligence platform for large organizations.

Echosec Systems is now a leading open-source intelligence service (OSINT) that uses publicly available information (PAI) from social media and other sources. They help public and private organizations improve situational awareness and identify threats using geographic insights with real-time data.

Echosec was partially sold to a "search fund" called The Tusker Fund in 2020 and Jeff Oldenburg came in as CEO to scale the company, which he did. In 2022, Flashpoint acquired Echosec completely and the business continues to grow.

In this episode, Karl explains:

• How they started as an inexpensive B2C solution and then pivoted to large B2B deals with big organizations
• What it's like to be a Canadian software company selling a threat detection service to large organizations around the world
• How they finally started to scale when they focused on the largest customers with the biggest needs
• How he worked with a private investor to start the company but used venture debt to grow it when they were profitable
• What a "search fund" is and why this was a great fit to partially acquire the company and bring in an experienced CEO
• What it was like to sell the company and not be the CEO-in-charge any more
• What he learned about himself in this journey that he is applying to his next venture

Find out more at practicalfounders.com.

Brad Redding calls his first startup a "successful failure." It didn't end well, but he learned several very important lessons that helped him be more successful with his second startup, Elevar. Now the bootstrapped SaaS company is growing steadily with 45 remote employees. And Brad is learning fast to be a capable CEO of a larger SaaS software company.

Brad's deep experience with e-commerce advertising data and conversation tracking analytics helped him find a problem to solve. He and his cofounder funded the development of the first product by providing consulting services to the same customers they were trying to serve with their new software product.

It took three years before they found product-market fit and started to grow steadily and profitably. Now Elevar is a growing SaaS business that helps 6,500 e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands that use Shopify to ensure the accuracy of their conversion tracking data and analytics. Brad has never raised outside funding and he has no intention of raising money or selling the company.

"I am certainly evolving as a leader through reading. Leaders are readers. And through coaching and through surrounding myself with other leaders who have grown companies to the size we are growing into.

"The way I look at is that no longer can I just assume that I'm going to figure it out on my own. I need to invest in myself, invest in my leaders, invest in my brain and my habits, and improve everything. Not necessarily all at once, but over time.

"It's all about the team. You build the people and bring in the right team and the team is going to build the business and that business is going to evolve. If you just stay in the game long enough and have the right team and the right people leading, you'll follow the customers and solve their problems."

In this episode, Brad explains:

• The painful lessons of his first startup that he was able to apply and do differently with Elevar, his second startup
• Why he bootstrapped Elevar instead of raising VC funding
• Why he doesn't think of products and services as two different things when solving customers' problems
• How he is intentionally investing in self-development to learn to be the CEO he needs to be to continue to grow the company
• Why it took three years to find product-market fit despite being a domain expert in his industry

Learn more at practicalfounders.com.