#124: From Services to SaaS Products to a Successful Acquisition in India - Sunando Bhattacharya
Release Date: 12/27/2024
#152: Practical SaaS CEO Stays On After 100% Cash Sale - Tracy Larson
Practical Founders Podcast
Tracy Larson is President and CEO of WeSuite, a vertical sales automation platform designed for larger integrators who sell complete security systems for commercial and residential real estate. Tracy and the cofounders were in the security systems business before launching a sales software company for this market in 2008. is now a comprehensive solution that addresses the complex industry requirements for lead tracking, quoting, proposal management, contracting, commissions, and pipeline management. Hundreds of integrators in the US use WeSuite for their end-to-end quote-to-contract...
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#151: Facial Recognition SaaS for Casinos to Almost $10M in Revenue – Henry Valentino
Practical Founders Podcast
Henry Valentino is the founder and CEO of , a leading provider of facial recognition software for casinos and stadiums, ensuring venue security and compliance. He founded EConnect in 2009 and pivoted several times before focusing on a security platform utilizing AI for casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Econnect platform offers facial recognition surveillance software that integrates with special cameras at venue entrances to identify known security risks and ensure compliance. Security teams get immediate identification of “known bad guys” in large venues. Econnect is...
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#150: Grew an Unsexy Small Software Biz Into a SaaS Powerhouse - Josh Turley
Practical Founders Podcast
Josh Turley is CEO of , a fleet management software company that his grandfather started in the 1980’s and ran as a small family business for decades. Then Josh’s father ran the business until 2015, never growing this slow, old-school business past $2 million in revenues. Josh had worked in the business before, but in 2016, Josh bought the business, to over as CEO and slowly began to make improvements—and mistakes—as they started to grow. Josh had an ambition to grow the company and learn how to be a real CEO. They started retooling their code to build modern cloud software,...
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#149: How Partner-Led Sales Built A $7M Bootstrap SaaS Business - Sameer Narkar
Practical Founders Podcast
Sameer Narkar is the founder and CEO of , a global SaaS company based in Mumbai that provides an omnichannel customer experience platform to consumer brands in 100 countries. Sameer created Konnect Insights in 2015 to help customer service teams respond to customers who mention their brands on social media. The product and company have expanded from a slow start working through marketing agencies in India to now distributing through ISV partners in all major global regions. The Konnect Insights product includes social listening, ticketing, reputation monitoring, and social media analytics....
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#148: These Bootstrappers Sold Modern Digital LeadGen to Conservative German Businesses - Chris Erler
Practical Founders Podcast
Chris Erler was co-founder and COO of ComX, a sales pipeline generation for mid-market B2B companies in Germany and Europe. Chris and two other founders started the company in 2018 to conduct turnkey modern digital marketing and lead generation solutions for traditional German companies. As a tech-enabled service that combines technology, data, and people-powered solutions, ComX delivers proven results through subscription and outcome-based pricing. They grew quickly to approximately $20 million in revenue in four years before being acquired by the private equity firm FLEX Capital. In...
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#147: How a Philadelphia Insurance Agent Built the Uber of Surety Bonds - Aaron Steffey
Practical Founders Podcast
Aaron Steffey is the co-founder and co-CEO of , an online platform that enables insurance agents and brokers to issue surety bonds instantly — without the lengthy paperwork or back-and-forth typically involved in bonding. Aaron was an insurance agent, and his co-founder cousin, Chris, was a surety bond underwriter before 2019, when they set out to revolutionize the way surety bonds are bought and sold. They initially bootstrapped with a software development partner who accepted equity instead of fees. Their first version drastically simplified the process of buying and selling surety bonds...
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#146: This European SaaS Bootstrapper Raised $22M in Growth Equity Without Losing Control - Roy van den Broek
Practical Founders Podcast
Roy van den Broek is the founder and CEO of , a rental business management software platform for event and media production companies. Roy built software for his event equipment rental business in the Netherlands. He had over 100 software customers in Europe before selling his rental equipment company in 2015 to focus on growing his Rentman SaaS company. Rentman grew slowly and profitably as word of mouth spread in the industry and their product evolved. In 2024, after growing to nearly 100 employees and 200,000 users across 100 countries, Roy raised a $22 million growth equity round...
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#145: Making Big Bold Bets with Patient Execution as a Bootstrapped Founder - Gopal Krishnamurthy
Practical Founders Podcast
Gopal Krishnamurthy is the founder and CEO of , which has a suite of products focused on enterprise performance management (EPM). Their apps allow users to plan, report, and analyze data using the modern native app framework vs. traditional SaaS on top of modern cloud data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, and others. Lumel’s products provide a full stack of integrated Planning, BI & data apps on the customers' data platforms. He grew his enterprise services company, Visual BI, to over 200 employees and sold that company to Atos in 2021, as he described in his ...
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#144: From Founder-Led Sales to Scalable Go-To-Market in Vertical SaaS - Phil Stern
Practical Founders Podcast
Phil Stern is the operating principal of , a growth equity firm that invests in bootstrapped vertical SaaS companies. Mainsail offers deep operating support to the leaders in their portfolio companies to help them grow more efficiently. Phil leads the GTM operations team, helping their founders scale sales, marketing, and success teams. Phil was an experienced SaaS sales leader at several companies before joining Mainsail to focus on helping their portfolio companies scale up to $30M ARR or more. Phil’s team helps founders solve challenging problems with sales leadership, rev ops...
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#143: From Professional Services to a $30M SaaS Business with a PE Acquisition - Sean Hoban
Practical Founders Podcast
Sean Hoban was co-founder and former CEO of Kimble Applications, a leading professional services automation (PSA) software for organizations to manage their professional services business's entire operational and financial lifecycle. Sean and his co-founders had already started, grown, and sold a pro services organization before creating a PSA product and building a SaaS business. With a little funding from the founders and a few angel investors, Kimble started efficiently and grew steadily, eventually raising a practical minority funding round from private equity investors Accel-KKR in...
info_outlineSunando Bhattacharya spent 13 years as a business leader in managed IT services companies in India before starting his own cloud tech services business. This company grew slowly and an opportunity arose to create a software product for one of their clients. Two years later, in 2019, they had a few more Apiculus product customers and focused more on the product.
Apiculus is a complete "cloud-as-a-service" software platform for data centers to offer, sell, deploy, and manage cloud data services for their own customers. They focused on smaller data centers in emerging markets, including Nepal, Oman, Rwanda, and others in the Middle East and Africa.
The Apiculus business grew as it turned into a product-first company. They overcame many challenges during COVD and with customers and partners that didn't work out. In 2024, the company was acquired by Yotta, and Indian cloud technology company, in a strategic acquisition.
Quote from Sunando Bhattacharya, founder of Apiculus
"Somebody asked me what one thing you want for your company. I said I wanted my company featured on Great Places to Work. It's very important that the team that works with me finds this a great place to work.
"The only secret ingredient for tech companies is people. It's people who make the technology. And if you take care of your team, you take care of your people, you will always do well.
"This isn't just for services companies. Talent and ability are important. But for somebody to bring their best every day to work and deliver something world-class, which is world-beating, it needs a very different level of passion. And that passion will only come from your team if you take care for them."
Links
Podcast Sponsor - Cypress Growth Capital
This week’s podcast is sponsored by my friends at Cypress Growth Capital. For 15 years, Cypress has provided non-dilutive growth funding to bootstrapped SaaS founders, including many successful founders I’ve interviewed here on this podcast.
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