x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Practical Founders Podcast

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast with host Greg Head for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies--without big funding.

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

01:06:58

#78: Fast-Growing K-12 Education Software Company...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2024/01/19

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

en

58:20

#77: Bootstrapped and Winning in Season Ticket...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2024/01/12

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

en

59:55

#76: Real Estate Investor Built Her Own CRM Solution...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/12/29

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

en

01:01:26

#75: Bootstrapped Their Digital Health Platform to...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/12/22

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.

en

01:00:55

#74: Practical Holding Company Acquires Profitable...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/12/15

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

en

01:02:47

#73: Bootstrapped to successful $67 million exit with...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/12/08

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

en

01:06:59

#72: Serial entrepreneur funded his biggest idea yet...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/12/01

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 management

en

01:05:08

#71: Bootstrapped the core software that runs complex...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/11/24

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 remote

en

01:09:38

#70: Bootstrapped to $3M and Raised a VC Round Before...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/11/17

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 with a

en

01:11:20

#69: Bootstrapped a Fintech Payments Platform to $10M...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/11/10

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 payment

en

01:11:26

#68: Bootstrapped and Sold a Successful Startup in...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/11/03

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 grew to

en

01:01:55

#67: Grew and Sold a Profitable Healthcare Software...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/10/27

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 acquired

en

01:06:49

#66: Serial SaaS Founder Had Three Successful Exits...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/10/20

Raj Khera has had three exits as a software entrepreneur and leader in his long career. His first company, GovCon, grew in the late 1990s to help government contractors easily access new contracts up for bid by the US government. Their advertising and subscription revenues grew quickly, and he sold GovCon in 1999 for $12.5 million. He bootstrapped one of the first email marketing software businesses in the early 2000s called MailerMailer to help small businesses send emails. Raj and his brother Vik

en

01:11:51

#65: The Bootstrapped Rocket-Ride Success Story of...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/10/13

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

en

59:02

#64: Bootstrapped, very profitable and still having...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/10/06

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

en

55:13

#63: Successfully Scaling Up a Bootstrapped Vertical...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/09/29

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

en

55:44

#62: She Quit Her CPA Job to Create This Fast-Growing...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/09/22

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

en

01:11:27

#61: Sold His Bootstrapped SaaS Company for 16X...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/09/15

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

en

01:08:47

#60: Created a Practical Venture Studio After Selling...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/09/08

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

en

53:01

#59: Using Royalty-Based Financing for Non-Dilutive...

Practical Founders Podcast ·

2023/09/01

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

en

178 results

Similar Podcasts

TaxTalent.com The Golden Rule Podcast

Adam Golden

TaxTalent.com Podcast

Tony Santiago

Handelsblatt Crime - spannende Streitfälle der deutschen Wirtschaft

Ina Karabasz, Solveig Gode, Sönke Iwersen

Deffner und Zschäpitz – Der Wirtschafts-Talk von WELT

WELT

Black Box - La scatola nera della finanza

Guido Brera e Gian Luca Comandini -...