Practical Founders Podcast

"My B2B SaaS startup needs just more warm leads. But we have struggled when we hire junior salespeople to call on and email cold prospects to generate qualified leads that the CEO or salespeople can close." This is a common frustration for startup and early-stage SaaS founders when they hire sales development reps (SDRs) or business development reps (BDRs) to generate qualified leads. There are many misconceptions and pitfalls that make this even more challenging. Christine Rogers shares her expertise on what is working and not working when hiring SDRs to generate or warm-up leaders in the modern software business. Christine is an experienced SaaS sales leader who has helped develop thousands of SaaS sales and SDR reps to succeed at growing software companies through her company Aspireship. In this episode, Christine explains: What are the different tasks and roles of sales development reps (SDRs) and business development reps (BDRs) in growing SaaS companies What tools, processes, and ideal customer definitions are required before you hire your first SDR Which SaaS business models make the most sense to use SDRs in the sales process Which outbound lead development approaches are productive in generating qualified discussions What compensation ranges are typical for SDRs this year How to think about SDR business goals and targets If you should hire one SDR or a sales manager-doer as your first sale hire When should founders hire "full-cycle" salespeople instead of a lead gen-only SDR Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Dave Whorton is an experienced tech investor and funded founder who spent the first 20 years of his career at the highest levels of Silicon Valley venture capital and tech-boom startups. He started his career at Hewlett Packard and experienced the famous "HP Way" culture firsthand before he attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He joined the preeminent tech venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and worked directly with John Doerr for several years before launching Good Technology and raising $63 million in venture funding in the early 2000s. He brought in a CEO to run the company before it was sold to Motorola. Dave joined the large tech private equity firm TPG and directed many investments there before creating his own small venture capital firm and making several investments in the 2000s. Dave started to become disenchanted with the "Get Big Fast" of the venture capital approach. He talked to several founders who were growing businesses without any outside funding and who were building better businesses with better cultures and better outcomes with no intent to ever sell their companies. In 2013, Dave started the Tugboat Institute, a membership organization that brings together Evergreen® CEOs across industry sectors to share best practices and unique insights, and to develop trusted bonds for their respective Evergreen paths. Evergreen leaders are seasoned entrepreneurs, CEOs, and presidents with the vision, creativity, resourcefulness, patience, and grit to build and scale a business that will stay private indefinitely. Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Windermere Real Estate is a large and well-known residential real estate broker in the Seattle area. In the late 1990s, they invested to build an internal software system to power their own business and differentiate their services. After using and improving their software for over 10 years, the family owners of Windermere spun out the software as a new company called MoxiWorks. They hired experienced tech entrepreneur and marketer York Baur to lead the new MoxiWorks business as CEO in 2012. After rewriting the software from scratch, they started selling their solution to other large brokers in the US. They grew steadily and expanded their product platform and their team. MoxiWorks is now a leading platform system for large residential real estate brokerages, serving over 800 brokerages and 400,000 agents nationwide, which account for more than 20% of transactions in the U.S. MoxiWorks started as an internal technology investment at Windermere Real Estate, but their early growth years were funded by the Windermere owners and customer sales. In 2019, Vector Capital made a major investment to help MoxiWorks expand beyond its current $50 million in revenue and 300 employees. See the full-text transcript and show notes at practicalfounders.com.

Patrick Campbell wasn't expecting to be an entrepreneur when he grew up, but after his first few jobs, he struck out on his own in 2012 to create a software company to help SaaS businesses optimize their pricing. Price Intelligently quickly evolved into a tech-enabled service that allowed him to grow, build a team, and ultimately launch ProfitWell. ProfitWell is a free and powerful SaaS metrics product that automatically calculates MRR, ARR, churn, and other import financial measures for SaaS and subscription companies from their payments data. It is now used by over 35,000 subscription businesses. Profitwell now offers paid products for managing churn, credit card failure, revenue recognition, and price optimization. Patrick bootstrapped ProfitWell with no outside funding, but they grew fast to 100 employees before being acquired by UK-based Paddle for $200 million in 2022. He openly shares the story of how they started, grew, survived, and eventually sold the company—and how the acquisition is going one year after the acquisition. In this episode, Patrick explains: How it grew in the early day as Price Intelligently, a tech-enabled pricing strategy service for SaaS companies How they bootstrapped for 10 years with efficient growth and savvy pricing Why Patrick thinks now that he should have raised some funding and why they didn't at the time How they created Profitwell and gave it away for free, then created upsell products to monetize their large and loyal user base How they grew fast with an extensive inbound media model with episodic content on top of their inbound middle-of-funnel content Why he chose to stay with Paddle and contribute to achieving the big vision instead of selling for cash and moving on What it's like now for him and his team a year after their acquisition by Paddle, a UK company Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Jon Nordmark founded eBags.com in 1998 as one of the first Internet e-commerce companies and grew it into the largest online retailer of luggage, bags, and travel accessories. Jon was previously a successful corporate executive who led marketing for Samsonite. eBags raised $30 million of VC funding in 1999 and survived the dot-com boom and the 2001 bust era, but the crazy growth expectations of VC investors often felt misaligned with the profitable growth path of the company and the market. eBags was eventually acquired by Samsonite in 2017 after selling $1.65 billion worth of products. Jon's second software company is Iterate.ai, a low-code enterprise innovation platform allowing big companies to integrate, test and scale new technologies quickly and efficiently. The company was initially funded by services revenue and then by software sales. Jon eventually raised $3 million in angel funding and a strategic investment from a large customer. Iterate.ai has grown to over $10 million in revenue with no salesperson and an $82,000 marketing budget. It is now profitable, with no plan to raise outside funding from big VC or PE investors. This company overcame the recent challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and emerged stronger. In this episode, Jon explains: How he started and grew eBags.com into one of the largest and the only profitable online retailers in the early 2000s The brutally frustrating challenges he faced after raising big VC funding when the company was growing but didn't meet investors' extreme expectations How he kept returning as CEO of eBags after retiring, then eventually sold the company Why he is staying away from big VC funding with his second company, Iterate.ai How they approached a strategic investment from their largest customer Why it took them 7 years to get to real, scalable product-market fit Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Perry Rosenbloom moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2011 and started a small business offering digital marketing and custom website services. After building a website for his mother-in-law, an independent therapist, Perry created a scrappy subscription-based website builder platform to make websites for other behavioral health professionals. The Brighter Vision company grew steadily and efficiently without big outside funding and eventually provided custom mobile-ready websites and marketing tools to over 4,000 therapists. The company grew to 35 employees with an all-new website-building platform before being acquired by EverCommerce in 2020 for $17.5 million.

Gopal Krishnamurthy was an early BI and data analytics expert working for a large company when he left to start a BI consulting company called Visual BI in 2010. Visual BI grew to over 300 employees serving enterprise customers as an evangelist to push emerging Data & Analytics trends with SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, SAP Analytics Cloud, Snowflake, DBT, and Microsoft Power BI. They also created several add-on products, which Gopal and his partner Jay retained when he sold the Visual BI consulting company in 2021 to Atos. Gopal and Jay now lead the growing team in Lumel, the leading provider of add-on products for the massive Microsoft Power BI ecosystem which was carved out from Visual BI. Lumel gets continuous growth funding with the proceeds of the sale of the services business, but the company is on track to be profitable by end of 2023 with almost 200 employees in the US and India. Lumel products (Inforiver, ValQ, and xViz) gaining momentum and adoption from numerous large enterprises worldwide, and their paying subscribers have crossed 2,000+ organizations already. Gopal shares his transformational story of growing from technical employee to successful consulting company CEO to now product CEO. Gopal has been a pioneer in establishing the new software category of add-on solutions to existing BI platforms. He believes that in the coming years, customers will continue to gravitate towards consolidating and maximizing their cloud and BI investments vs. buying best-of-the-breed stand-alone software. this episode, Gopal shares: How he grew a fast-growing consulting services business called Visual BI by serving large companies in the US using SAP software Why they started to build add-on products for the SAP Business Objects ecosystem, then invested in cloud-based add-on products for Microsoft PowerBI How they sold their consulting business to Atos in 2021 and kept their products to start Lumel How they are transitioning from a portfolio of point solution products to a family of integrated solutions for large enterprises Why Gopal doesn't think VC investment makes sense for Lumel even as they grow faster with marketing efforts, despite his big and bold vision that wouldn't be a good fit for "get big fast" VCs Find out more at practicalfounders.com.

Matt Watson was a two-time software company with two successful exits before he was 40 years old. He started his first company, VinSolutions, in his basement in Kansas City in 2006. VinSolutions started by helping auto dealers upload photos of their cars to sell in the popular Autotrader catalog and website. Matt was the first developer and product visionary who lead a team that build their popular CRM and lead management system to help those dealers manage internet leads and sell cars faster. Their revenue doubled every year as they grew to eventually serve thousands of auto dealers with their pioneering web-based software.VinSolutions didn't raise any venture capital or private equity investment as they grew to over 300 employees. In 2011, VinSolutions was acquired by Autotrader.com itself for a reported $150 million. Matt started Stackify in 2012 as the CEO funding the startup with his own money. Stackify is a tool for software developers using cloud platforms to manage and optimize application performance, a problem Matt had experienced at VinSolutions. Stackify grew slowly and struggled at first before it grew steadily. Stackify was acquired by Netreo in 2021. In this episode, Matt explains: How they started by taking photos of cars for auto dealers to sell those cars online, then bootstrapped a CRM software product to help dealers manage internet leads What it was like to be the CTO of a pioneer in web-based software with a recurring revenue business model back in 2008 when the auto industry was in a massive recession The benefits and drawbacks of growing a large vertical software company in Kansas City Why they tried to raise capital but started the process to sell the company instead Why Matt started a new company called Stackify as the CEO with a different customer focus, technology stack, and different sales model than his previous company Why did he self-funded Stackify and then raised venture debt as they grew, but didn't raise big VC funding What it is like to be a two-time founder of software companies with successful exits before he was 40 years old Find out more at practicalfounders.com.

Deb Muller, an experienced HR executive, started HR Acuity to manage employee incident investigations and ended up building a successful software company. They discuss the growth of the company, raising funding, selling the product to HR leaders, and addressing sexual harassment. Advice for women founders is also shared.

Vivek Bhaskaran was a computer science student in college who worked on an online survey tool for a professor in the marketing department. After school, he built a new survey tool with a fellow software developer while they still held their day jobs. QuestionPro grew slowly and profitably with efficient search engine optimization and viral marketing, avoiding the need to raise any money from outside investors. QuestionPro grew steadily by expanding the product with more powerful features for larger companies to sell larger deals that required regional enterprise salespeople. They also expanded regionally with offices in US, UK, Germany, Australia, and Latin America. Recently, they have acquired several companies with survey products used by large global companies that added to their customer base. Vivek talks openly about their key inflection points in their journeys of revenue growth, global expansion, recruiting leadership talent, developing systems and processes, and expanding their product portfolio. QuestionPro has 300 employees with $35 million in revenue. Vivek is enjoying the learning and professional challenges of being the CEO of a software company that is growing to over $100 million in revenues. In this episode, Vivek explains: How they grew fast and profitably in the early years with successful search marketing with a freemium survey tool product and chat sales support How his role changed at important revenue inflection points at $1 million revenue with scrappy founders, then stalling at $4 million, growing to $10 million with an organized team, and now to over $30 million with a global organization with systems and processes How they have grown with regional expansion with autonomous sales offices and multiple products including several acquired products Why he doesn't say they are a "US company" as they have fully remote employees around the world with no headquarters Why they charge an additional fee to big customers to develop new features that eventually enhance their core products Find out more at practicalfounders.com.