Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA, Zero VC - Rohit Garg
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How do you build a $16.5M vertical SaaS company with 24% EBITDA margins with zero paid acquisition, zero outside funding, and your wife as co-founder? Rohit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Practice by Numbers, an all-in-one dental practice management platform serving 1,300 customers across 2,000 locations. He started building it in 2015 because his wife is a dentist and he was the one running SQL queries to answer her business questions. Today they are bootstrapped, profitable, and sitting on $2 billion in untouched payment GMV from their existing customer base. You'll learn: Why Rohit...
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Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M
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How do you build a $10M business by teaching robots to write handwritten notes with real pens, and do it with zero outside investment for 12 straight years? David Wachs sold his text message marketing company for eight figures in 2012, started Handwrytten the next day, and has bootstrapped it to 200 custom-built robots in a Phoenix facility sending 350,000 notes per month. He owns 100% of the company, took $350K in profit last year, and is targeting $10 to $11M in revenue this year. You'll learn: Why David thinks physical CapEx is now a competitive moat in the AI era, and why he is glad he...
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Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
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How do you go from a pricing experiment inside a failing product to $3.6 million in annual revenue with 10,000 customers — in under two years and with zero paid marketing? Eugene Cheah is the co-founder and CEO of Featherless.ai, the largest open source LLM inference provider on Hugging Face. He co-created RWKV, the first attention-free AI architecture under the Linux Foundation, and today runs a 27-person team serving customers that pay anywhere from $25 a month to $2 million a year. You'll learn: Why Featherless started as an accident — a pricing experiment that outperformed the...
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Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net Retention - Sankalp Arora
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How do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year? Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying an average of $500K per year with net revenue retention of 170%. You'll learn: Why Sankalp...
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Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank
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How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting? Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation. You'll learn: Why Krenar almost went bankrupt twice and laid off 75% of his team — and what kept him going...
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Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman
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How do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check? Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300 employees across the US and Cluj, Romania. You'll learn: Why Mike structured his entire $10M...
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$28M Series A at $100M Val: The Pest Control SaaS Nobody Saw Coming
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How do you build a $100M SaaS company by charging apartment residents $5 a month to keep rats out of their bedroom? Justin Clements is the co-founder and CEO of PestShare, an on-demand pest control platform embedded inside property management software. He bootstrapped from 2019 to 2020, raised just $5M over two rounds, then closed a $28M Series A at a $100M valuation in 2025, the same year he crossed $10M ARR. You'll learn: — Why PestShare's revenue model is structured like a warranty, and why that makes it nearly impossible to churn — The difference between contracted ARR and live...
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He Lost $50/User to Build a $30M ARR AI Empire (Fathom)
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How do you go from 0 to $30 million in ARR in just 3 years while purposely losing money on every single free user? Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, a free AI meeting assistant used by hundreds of thousands of professionals daily. After running UserVoice for nearly two decades, Richard entered the hyper-competitive AI transcription war against giants like Zoom, Otter, and Firefly. Instead of playing the traditional VC game, he gave the product away, lost $50 per user, and built an absolute rocket ship that dominates through bottom-up distribution. You’ll learn: — Why...
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How 1Mind Hit $1M in 3 Months Selling $100k AI Sales Agents
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How do you hit $1 million in contracted revenue in three months and achieve 211% net dollar retention in your first year? Amanda Kahlow is the founder and CEO of 1Mind, an AI platform building go-to-market superhumans that replace SDRs, AEs, and sales engineers. You’ll learn: - How to sell AI software for $100,000 to $400,000 using flat subscription pricing instead of metered models. - The unit economics of replacing 89 SDRs and 19 sales engineers with a single custom agent. - How they maintain 80 to 90 percent SaaS margins while running heavy LLM operations. - The strategy...
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Selling Check for $400M, Now Building a $1.5M ARR AI Startup
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How do you build a $1.5 million ARR enterprise AI platform after previously selling a fintech startup for nearly $400 million? Ahikam Kaufman is the CEO of SafeBooks AI, an agentic data automation platform for the office of the CFO. You’ll learn: - How to charge $125,000 ACVs by pricing against the cost of an accounting headcount. - Why the company raised a $15 million seed round just to build their initial data architecture. - How they landed a $300,000 engagement in their first year of going to market. - The exact strategy Ahikam used to distribute $25 million in retention bonuses during a...
info_outlineRomain Torres is the founder of ArcAds.ai, an AI-powered video ad platform that helps marketers create and scale ad creatives with zero production overhead. In just 20 months, he scaled the company from $5K to over $10M in ARR—completely bootstrapped.
In this episode, Romain shares how he validated demand without even having a dashboard, the growth playbook that drove viral traction, and the three channels fueling ArcAds’ revenue engine today: paid ads, sales, and influencer marketing. He also dives into usage-based pricing, churn recovery, and what’s next for the company.
Notes:
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Growth Levers
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Reached $10M ARR in under 2 years
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From $5K to $64K MRR in 1 month after a viral tweet
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Paid ads, influencer virality, and enterprise sales are main levers
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GTM Strategy
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Started with direct outreach and manual fulfillment
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Product-led motion with a transition into high-touch enterprise sales
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Events and conferences (Affiliate World, App Growth Summit) for pipeline
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Revenue & Pricing
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Usage-based pricing (number of generated ads, actors, etc.)
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Highest ACV in the six figures
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Profitably bootstrapped despite heavy infrastructure/API costs
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Churn & Retention
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Early churn spike due to product breaking after viral growth
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Rebuilt platform in one month post-refunds
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Retention improved with onboarding and product stability
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Scaling Operations
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8-person lean team managing 210+ live ads
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Internal use of ArcAds platform to generate their own creatives
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Strong rev-per-employee metrics
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Data & Tech Stack
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Sits on top of GenAI models from OpenAI, Google, ByteDance
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Auto-selects best model per prompt based on use case
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Internal feedback loops using ad performance data to improve UX and features
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Founder Insight
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Tested market fit without a product UI
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Hired sales after passing $5M ARR
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SEO and enterprise sales are next big focus areas
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What you’ll learn:
Founder Story
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How Romain validated the idea with no product
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Why ArcAds went viral and what broke
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Bootstrapping vs VC-backed strategy
Pricing & Revenue
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Usage-based monetization and six-figure ACVs
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Profit margins despite high API costs
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Leveraging viral growth to fund product rebuild
GTM & Outbound
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Transition from product-led to outbound sales
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Scaling via events, outreach, and Twitter content
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Building a two-person sales team to close big brands
SEO & AEO
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Organic strategy and plans for future growth
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Why they’ve done no SEO so far—and why that’s changing
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How content virality and influencer posts fueled spikes
Acquisition & Scaling
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Managing churn during hypergrowth
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Operating a multi-million ARR business with 8 people
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Systems for testing, tracking, and scaling 200+ ad creatives