#164: SaaS Founders Save Millions With Fractional Senior Engineers - Praveen Ghanta
Release Date: 10/03/2025
#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_outlinePraveen Ghanta, founder of Fraction and former CEO of HiddenLevers, shares how he turned his experience scaling a bootstrapped SaaS company into a fast-growing fractional talent marketplace. After HiddenLevers reached $8M in ARR and sold for over $100M, he realized that senior fractional engineers were the secret to delivering efficiently without expensive full-time hires.
Fraction now serves over 100 SaaS clients with a vetted pool of 500 senior U.S.-based engineers and CTOs. Typical engagements run 10–30 hours a week, helping founders tackle scaling challenges in vertical SaaS, AI engineering, DevOps, and legacy system conversions. The company has reached $10M ARR in just three years while keeping half its own team fractional.
Praveen explains how clients use Fraction to save costs, speed development, and even prepare for M&A due diligence with fractional CTOs. He also highlights how AI has boosted senior developer productivity by 4x, why U.S.-only context matters, and how fractional-to-full-time hiring often becomes a win-win path.
This interview is perfect for SaaS founders at $1M–10M ARR, hitting scaling issues, vertical SaaS leaders needing senior engineers without VC funding, and founders considering AI-powered product features and engineering talent.
Key Takeaways
- Fractional Individual Contributors: Not just execs—senior engineers deliver hands-on code, marketing, and DevOps part-time.
- AI Productivity Boost: Senior developers using AI tools are delivering 2–4x more than peers without them.
- Cost Advantage: Starting at $5K/month, founders access senior dev talent without $200K+ full-time salaries.
- Best ICP Fit: Vertical SaaS companies at $1–10M ARR facing scaling issues or legacy migrations.
- Developer Productivity: Fraction leveraged its experience with over 100 clients to build DevHawk.ai, a tool that manages fractional talent and delivers results even more efficiently.
This Interview Is Perfect For
- SaaS founders stuck at scaling challenges without a budget for big teams
- Bootstrappers and practical founders looking for senior engineering firepower
- Founders facing legacy code, scaling issues, or AI feature rollouts
- Non-technical founders struggling to manage offshore or junior dev teams
Quote from Praveen Ghanta, founder of Fraction
“There are a lot of very experienced engineers who get into a senior developer role, but if they’re not going to become the manager of the team, there's not a really good and obvious career path for them.
“They start to get bored because they know their job inside and out and it's relatively easy for them to keep delivering.
“So working on a startup on the side is actually a way for both for them to sort of enrich their career and see new things and have that creative satisfaction, but at the same time, not take the risk. There are plenty of folks that want to be full-time at the startup, but there's risk in being at a startup.”
Links
Podcast Sponsor – Fraction
This podcast is sponsored by Fraction. Fraction gives you access to senior US-based engineers and CTOs — without full-time costs or hiring risks. Get 10 to 30 hours per week from vetted and experienced US-based talent.
Find your next fractional senior engineer or CTO at fraction.work. You can start with a one-week, risk-free trial to test it out.
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