Phil Dur is cofounder and managing partner of PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity investment firm that works with bootstrapped SaaS founders who are scaling up to become sizable market leaders. Phil has been funding capital-efficient software founders for over 20 year and has served on 45 boards with those companies. In this expert podcast interview, Phil explains: Why the practical growth equity approach is fundamentally different from the venture investment approach How PeakSpan and other...

Joe McMenemon and his college roommate, Brendan, knew they wanted to start a business together. They had run their college fraternity chapter and saw the problem of managing members and collecting payments. So they lived frugally and built a software solution  for fraternities and sororities to solve this problem. ChapterSpot grew slowly over several years as they sold to local chapters. Eventually, the national associations came calling, requesting an enterprise solution to manage hundreds...

Jeromy Wilson spent over ten years in the software business as a product management leader working for PE-owned and VC-funded software companies. When he decided to start his own software company, he focused on serving public libraries, like his father, who had created a successful library automation software company called Dynix. Jeromy is the founder and CEO of Niche Academy, the leading learning and development platform for libraries in the US. With his savings and a little angel funding,...

Paul Van Metre was the co-founder of a successful machine shop that manufactured custom parts for the aerospace and medical device industries. Over 15 years, they created and improved software to run their entire business, which created huge efficiencies and helped them manage their growth. They sold that business in 2014 to focus on selling their complete software platform, called ProShop, to other forward-thinking machine shops.  ProShop is now one of North America's leading ERP...

Chris Savage is the co-founder of Wistia, a leading video marketing platform for businesses. Wistia was started in 2007 by Chris and a college friend when inexpensive cloud hosting and easy web video encoding became available. They created the first easy way to host and share videos with deep analytics and no ads for marketers to use on their websites.  With a bootstrapped approach and just $1.2 million in angel funding, Wistia grew quickly and profitably, becoming a leading video hosting...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a comprehensive and customizable platform used by hundreds of healthcare organizations around the world.  ZH Healthcare now has almost 200 employees in the US and India. The company has been profitable every year and has not taken on any outside funding. 

Kevin McArdle spent 15 years working in large software companies before becoming a practical investor and acquirer of smaller SaaS businesses. Kevin is the CEO and co-founder of Big Band Software, a holding company that buys and holds small, profitable, and growing SaaS businesses—with no intent of selling those businesses. Kevin has acquired over 40 businesses in the last 10 years with this buy-and-hold model.  As an expert guest on the podcast, Kevin answers common questions from practical...

Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol, a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional staff. Their revenue cycle management (RCM) analytics software reveals medical billing problems and missed revenue opportunities at physician offices in the US. As the company expanded its service offerings, Viewgol grew very quickly, from three employees...

Hamed Mazrouie owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete multi-site internet phone system to thousands of restaurants and law firms across the US. Vivant grew steadily and profitably for 10 years and is now a maturing business with 50 employees.  In the last four years, Hamed and his growing team have been building Milagro, a complete restaurant...

Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their first customer, they rewrote the software to serve other customers and the Vegam Solutions business started to grow.  Vegam Solutions is smart factory software for digital optimization and control of complex manufacturing plants. Vegam now has 180...

Jafar Owainati was a mechanical engineer before he got an MBA in entrepreneurship and decided to start a software company with two friends. They looked at many ideas before building software to help sales engineers respond to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) faster and easier. They launched Loopio in 2014 and had paying customers within one year.  The three founders built the software and sold the first customers before adding more employees as they approached $1M ARR. They kept growing faster...

Miles Schwartz a cofounder of Zūm Rails, a fast-growing fintech based in Canada with a growing worldwide presence. In just 3.5 years and without any outside funding, Zūm Rails has grown from a focused startup to a credible open banking and instant payment gateway with $10M in ARR. Zum Rails also integrated KYC (Know Your Customer) technology which reduces fraud across all payment types.  Miles and his cofounder had experience with fintech payments before they started Zum Rails to improve EFT...

Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising. He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he started a tech startup and participated in a tech accelerator.  The Bridge started as a community and jobs platform connecting UX designers in Latin America to work at startups and large agencies worldwide. They expanded the services offerings and eventually...

When Patrick Randolph discovered that doctors' offices lose 20% of appointments due to patient cancellations and no-shows, he set out to design and test a solution. QueueDr was created to fill those open slots with patients in the waitlist "queue." With just a little funding and lots of hard work, they began by helping small practices and group practices fill open slots with no human intervention. Eventually, they sold to larger organizations and became profitable as they grew. QueueDR was...