Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA, Zero VC - Rohit Garg
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net Retention - Sankalp Arora
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
$28M Series A at $100M Val: The Pest Control SaaS Nobody Saw Coming
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
He Lost $50/User to Build a $30M ARR AI Empire (Fathom)
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
How 1Mind Hit $1M in 3 Months Selling $100k AI Sales Agents
Top Founders
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...
info_outline
Selling Check for $400M, Now Building a $1.5M ARR AI Startup
Top Founders
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_outlineVlad Malanin, MD, PhD and co-founder of SpeedSize, shares how he scaled an AI-powered media optimization SaaS from $400K to $6M ARR with just 25 employees. SpeedSize helps enterprise and mid-market brands deliver high-quality images and video without sacrificing site performance, serving over 200 global customers.
In this episode, Vlad breaks down SpeedSize’s capital-efficient growth strategy, enterprise pricing model, partnership-led GTM motion, and the hard founder decisions required to survive near-zero runway during wartime—while maintaining low churn, strong expansion revenue, and founder control.
NOTES:
-
Founder background
-
Surgeon turned AI scientist and CTO
-
Forbes Technology Council member
-
Ukrainian-Israeli founding team navigating geopolitical risk
-
-
Company overview
-
AI-powered image and video compression for rich media websites
-
Focus on preserving visual quality while improving load speed
-
Core customers: fashion, apparel, marketplaces, travel, jewelry
-
-
Revenue & growth
-
$400K ARR in 2022
-
~$1.5M ARR in 2023
-
~$3M ARR in 2024
-
~$6M ARR today
-
200+ paying customers
-
Low churn with strong net revenue expansion
-
-
Pricing & ACV
-
Annual contracts only
-
Pricing based on:
-
Data transferred (GB)
-
Number of original assets / SKUs
-
-
ACV ranges:
-
$10K–$20K (lower mid-market)
-
$50K–$100K (mid-market)
-
Low seven figures (enterprise)
-
-
Multiple customers paying $100K+ annually
-
-
GTM & acquisition
-
Minimal reliance on paid ads
-
Partnership-led growth strategy:
-
AWS Premium Partner
-
IBM Cloud partnerships
-
Agency referrals
-
-
Focus on cloud providers lacking native media optimization
-
-
Sales motion
-
Land-and-expand strategy
-
Customers grow usage as they adopt richer media (video, animations)
-
Enterprise-focused negotiations vs self-serve SMB motion
-
-
Team & operations
-
Team downsized from 50 to ~25 for efficiency
-
~70% engineers
-
High revenue per employee
-
Cash-flow controlled with variable spend levers
-
-
Capital & fundraising
-
~$5M total raised (2022–2023)
-
Founders retain 70%+ ownership
-
Pre-Series A
-
Lessons learned from VC-driven spending pressure
-
-
Crisis management
-
Two months of runway during 2023 war escalation
-
Cash dropped below $300K
-
Founders cut their own salaries first
-
Focused on survival, efficiency, and customer retention
-
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Founder Story
-
Transitioning from medicine to AI SaaS
-
Building during war and geopolitical uncertainty
-
Making survival-first leadership decisions
Pricing & Revenue
-
Structuring enterprise SaaS pricing by usage
-
Designing ACV tiers from $10K to seven figures
-
Using land-and-expand to drive ARR growth
GTM & Partnerships
-
Why SpeedSize prioritized partnerships over outbound sales
-
How AWS and IBM partnerships actually work
-
The realities of enterprise marketplace distribution
Acquisition & Retention
-
Why low churn matters more than hypergrowth
-
Enabling customer expansion through product value
-
Avoiding paid ads in favor of scalable channels
Scaling & Operations
-
Downsizing teams without killing momentum
-
Managing cashflow with variable spend
-
Staying capital-efficient while retaining founder control
This episode is a must-watch for SaaS founders, operators, and investors interested in pricing, GTM strategy, retention, capital efficiency, and real founder resilience.