#152: Practical SaaS CEO Stays On After 100% Cash Sale - Tracy Larson
Release Date: 07/11/2025
#177: Building Multi-product Vertical SaaS With a Tiny Team - Robin Eissler
Practical Founders Podcast
Robin Eissler is the founder and CEO of , a vertical SaaS platform built for high school booster clubs. After selling her prior business as a private jet broker, Robin volunteered to run a local booster club and discovered a messy problem run with spreadsheets, emails, and manual accounting. She decided to build a single system that could actually handle it. BoosterHub now serves nearly 600 booster programs, representing over 100,000 users. With just two full-time employees and a small dev team, the company processes more than $40M in transactions across payments, fundraising, merchandise...
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#176: The Five Questions That Will Decide Your SaaS Progress Next Year - Greg Head
Practical Founders Podcast
As the year winds down, I want to share an end-of-year message for practical SaaS founders who want to make better progress in 2026. Based on my recent conversations with more than 40 CEOs in my Practical Founders peer groups, it’s clear that growth rates alone don’t define whether it was a “good” year. Founders experienced very different outcomes—and very different feelings about them. In this episode, I walk through five practical questions I believe founders should ask as they look ahead to 2026 (or their next quarter). These questions focus on whether you’re working on the...
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#175: The Hidden Founder Psychology Patterns Behind Stuck SaaS Companies - Dave Hersh
Practical Founders Podcast
Dave Hersh, co-founder and former CEO of Jive Software, shares the real story behind bootstrapping Jive to $12M in revenue before raising venture capital and scaling aggressively. He explains how fear, comparison, and the pressure to “go big” drove him to abandon his profitable core business and pursue a new upmarket strategy that ultimately cost the company its soul. After growing to $60 million, Jive eventually went public, but not without internal strain, personal turmoil, and ultimately the realization that the company had drifted away from what made it successful. Dave...
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#174: Plateaus, Pivots, and Staying Profitable: Solving Practical SaaS Puzzles - Josh Ho
Practical Founders Podcast
Josh Ho is the Founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a bootstrapped referral marketing platform serving SMBs that rely on multi-step, relationship-driven sales. Starting in 2015 as a solo developer consulting on the side, Josh built the first version himself, validated demand quickly, and landed early customers by doing demos and hands-on support. Referral Rock has grown to roughly 500 customers, 20 team members, and about $3M in annual revenue. The company scaled through strong inbound SEO, founder-led sales, and a high-touch onboarding model for B2B businesses that value referrals. Over...
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#173: From COVID Boom to Bootstrap Mode: Hubilo’s Refounder Story - Shailesh Hegde
Practical Founders Podcast
Shailesh Hegde is the CEO of , a Bangalore-based webinar software company that initially started during COVID as virtual events tech and raised $150M in VC funding before the market shifted. Originally joining as head of product, he stepped into the CEO role during a chaotic downturn and led the company through a full strategic reset after returning all the remaining capital to investors. When the virtual events boom collapsed, Shailesh and the team rebuilt Hubilo into a mid-market webinar platform serving B2B marketing teams. They shifted from large in-person event organizers to...
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#172: Why Long-Term Bootstrapping Still Works in Event Mgt. SaaS - Raju Patel
Practical Founders Podcast
Raju Patel founded over 25 years ago after building a speaker portal for a magazine company and realizing he had a repeatable software product. What began as a one-man shop in suburban Chicago evolved into a robust event-management platform serving associations that needed complex, multi-module functionality. His business grew steadily as he delivered registration, booth management, speaker portals, and onsite systems for demanding event teams. Today eShow has 125 employees, more than 14 integrated modules, and supports hundreds of events each year for 300+ customers, including large...
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#171: Lessons from a 9-Year Bootstrap Journey to a Private Equity Exit - Dharshan Rangegowda
Practical Founders Podcast
Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of , left a decade-long engineering career at Microsoft to solve a painful database operations problem he had lived firsthand. After early missteps selling to enterprises, he shifted to helping developers manage MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres on the cloud, bootstrapping the business from scratch. ScaleGrid grew steadily through product depth, technical support, and Dharshan’s mastery of SEO—becoming the top organic result for many key searches. The company expanded into multiple database engines, added a distributed engineering team, and reached 20 employees by...
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#170: Why Most SaaS Acquirers Still Want Profitable Growth in 2025 - Gaurav Bhasin
Practical Founders Podcast
Gaurav Bhasin is the founder and managing director of , an M&A advisory firm whose principals have completed over 100 sell-side transactions for software and tech founders. After two decades in investment banking and tech M&A, Gaurav is a sell-side advisor to B2B software founders who have built successful businesses and want to explore selling their companies. Allied Advisers typically works with founders selling their businesses for $20M–$200M, helping them prepare materials, run a competitive process, and negotiate terms. We discuss how today’s M&A market looks very...
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#169: Practical Pivot and Relaunch Created Profitable 200% Growth - Natalie Barbu
Practical Founders Podcast
Natalie Barbu is the founder and CEO of , a SaaS platform built to streamline collaboration and workflows for social media teams and agencies. She began as a YouTube creator, grew a following of over 300,000, and then identified the fragmentation of the creator tools market — which led her to build Rella 1.0. With some small seed funding, the first Rella version focused on content creators and made no revenue with a freemium model. With $25K in the bank and no revenue, the four cofounders thought they would shut it down. But a viral video focused on social media teams immediately...
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#168: These Three Superpowers Set Practical SaaS Founders Apart - Greg Head
Practical Founders Podcast
In this episode, the founder of Practical Founders, Greg Head, shares the most powerful insights from over 165 podcast interviews and working with 40+ bootstrapped SaaS founders in his peer groups. Greg breaks down the common but less obvious traits he sees in practical founders who are quietly building valuable software companies without big VC funding. Greg shares how frugality and managed risk-taking coexist to create compounding steady growth, creating massive long-term value fpr practical founders. And independence and doing it your way are not just luxuries but real superpowers that fuel...
info_outlineTracy 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.
WeSuite 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 process.
WeSuite grew profitably to nearly $5 million in revenue in 2024, when the founders sold 100% of the company to Valsoft, a buy-and-hold acquirer of practical software companies. Tracy remains the CEO of the company, which operates independently in the Valsoft holding company.
Quote from Tracy Larson, CEO and president of WeSuite
“For founders in SaaS, especially women founders, you need to find the right people to become your personal board of advisors. You don't need money to pay them. Just pick five people who you've known over the years to help you.
Ask them, Would you do this for me and be a sounding board once a month? I'd like to get your perspective on topics like these for 30 minutes. It’s not a formal board, it’s just advice and perspective.
“Establishing a personal board of advisors is a great idea. They can be women or men. And you can switch it up every year or so. Don’t worry about what you don't know. We all have things we don't know.”
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