#128: Solving a Challenging SaaS Growth Puzzle - Scott Desgrosseilliers
Release Date: 01/24/2025
#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_outlineScott Desgrosseilliers is the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a leading multi-touch marketing attribution software for SMBs who use paid online advertising. Scott is a data and analytics expert who saw the costly limitations of simple performance reports from popular ad platforms.
Wicked Reports was started as a bootstrapped software company in 2016 to serve smaller companies that spend millions on digital ads and other marketing, including email, SEO, and digital events. Determining which marketing activities drive incremental revenue is a tricky puzzle to unravel, but the payback of those insights is huge.
Scott raised a little angel funding and a little SaaS debt and is still going strong with 28 employees and is figuring out their growth and retention puzzle to accelerate growth.
Quote from Scott Desgrosseilliers, founder and CEO of Wicked Reports
"We had offers, and we could have raised VC funding early on, but then the growth rate we would have had to hit was too high, which didn't make sense for our business.
"A competitor of ours took $20 million from a similar VC, and then they had to cut a third of their team. I'm not saying anything against them. They have a nice product and they seem like good guys. They hired a ton of people and didn't hit the growth number, so they had to whack a bunch of them.
"Money isn't always the answer. I'm sure there are cases where it solved all sorts of problems, but most VCs want to invest when you already have growth and net revenue retention at 120% when the efficient growth problem's already solved!"
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