Practical Founders Podcast

Richard Change is co-founder and CEO of PFA Solutions, the provider of FirmView software. FirmView® is the leading carry and compensation management platform for private equity investors to manage their internal compensation from fees and carried interest.

Richard was a senior architect for a large private equity firm when he discovered this complex problem that was being managed on spreadsheets. He left to start PFA Solutions and bootstrapped the development of FirmView with consulting revenue. From inception, through growth and ultimately acquisition, Richard never took any outside funding.

FirmView adoption grew steadily, serving large private equity firms. PFA Solutions eventually grew to 34 employees before being acquired by Allvue Systems in 2024. Allvue is a private-equity-backed software company that serves the alternative investment industry.

Quote from Richard Change, co-founder and CEO of PFA Solutions

"Once you're in it, once you've decided to start a company, own it. No regrets. No one's going to save you. There's not a fairy godmother that will come and wave all your problems away. You have to own it.

"There's no magic wand that will come and wave a wand and say, OK, all your problems are solved. And that magic wand in my mind wasn't outside capital; it wasn't VC funding. That wasn't magic because what do when the money runs out?

"Is your product generating revenue? That's the real problem. If there's a problem to be solved and you have a great idea or solution, you can generate revenue from it. Prove to yourself and the world that this is viable and has product-market fit."

• PFA Solutions on LinkedIn
• PFA Solutions website
• Allvue Systems website
• Vista Equity Partners website

This week’s podcast is sponsored by my friends at Cypress Growth Capital. For 15 years, Cypress has provided non-dilutive growth funding to bootstrapped SaaS founders, including many successful founders I’ve interviewed here on this podcast. Message Cliff Sentell at Cypress to have an open discussion about your options.

The Practical Founders Podcast

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Dave Lambert and the team at Right Side Capital Management are the most active venture capital investors, having invested in over 2,000 startups since 2009.

Right Side Capital is a “pre-VC” institutional investor that operates very differently from traditional VCs: investing when SaaS companies have just a little revenue using a submission form on their website, then responding quickly and making investment decisions in a week. They also invest in practical SaaS founders with capital-efficient approaches who expect to sell their companies someday for less than $100M.

In this expert episode, Dave shares practical insights for SaaS founders who don’t expect to play the big VC funding game:

• Why raising Series A or B funding rounds from VCs reduces your odds of a successful exit
• What founders should be focused on when they get their first customers and revenue
• Why most VCs don’t invest when you have just a few customers and a little revenue
• How the founders they invested in are using AI technology to grow more efficiently
• What’s happening right now with acquisitions of SaaS companies for $25-$100M enterprise value

“More often than not, at the stages that we’re investing and someone has $4K, $8K, $20K MRR, the founders are still supremely confident and think they figured out their exact ICP and how it’s going to grow in scale. They think, We’re just going to take your money, and it’s going to be straight up from here. And it never does, or almost never does.

“We’re having conversations with founders where we’re sharing, Hey, just so you know, 90% of our companies miss their revenue targets massively in their first year. So you should assume that you are going to as well.

“But guess what? They all spend exactly what they thought they were gonna spend or more, usually. Just know that that’s gonna be the case and have a plan for where you’re still alive if things don’t go as expected.”

• Dave Lambert on LinkedIn
• Right Side Capital Management on LinkedIn
• Right Side Capital Management website

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.

Eric Dill was a successful mortgage broker in Sydney, Australia, who struggled with the same painful problem as every other broker: manually checking with multiple banks to validate and price mortgages for homeowners. Eric and his good friend Angus Keatinge resolved to create a software product to solve this complicated and chronic problem.

Quickli was launched in late 2021 and it immediately gained happy customers and fans without any proactive marketing or sales. Three years later, more than 10,000 mortgage brokers use Quickli every week—that's over 50% market share. Quickli has AUD $5 million in ARR with 40 employees.

This is an amazing story of two product-focused entrepreneurs who solved a difficult problem and grew a successful software company without any outside funding. Quickli still has almost no marketing staff and no salespeople. Most of their employees are engineers working on the product and customer service.

Quote from Eric Dill, cofounder and co-CEO of Quickli

“We just cracked the $5 million ARR figure in just three years, which is a big milestone for us. We have 10,000 brokers on the platform, which is over 50% of the total market in Australia. We also have 40 employees, mostly in engineering.

“It’s been very, very much a story of product-led growth. Our product completely solves the biggest problem that every broker has every day. No other product has solved it. Brokers have been telling each other about Quickli, and we have some really big fans. It’s a very tight community of brokers who help each other.

‘How lucky did we get? Because we didn’t do anything. Almost marketing and no sales. We have a website. To say we have half a marketing person feels like an overstatement because we have a customer service person who also does some marketing on the side for us.”

• Angus Keatinge on LinkedIn
• Eric Dill on LinkedIn
• Quickli on Linkedin
• Quickli website

This week’s podcast is sponsored by my friends at Cypress Growth Capital. For 15 years, Cypress has provided non-dilutive growth funding to bootstrapped SaaS founders, including many successful founders I’ve interviewed here on this podcast.

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.

Jeff Corn is the co-founder and former CEO of Virtuance, one of the US's leading real estate photography and marketing providers. In 2010, Jeff was in the real estate investment business and wondered why it took $10,000 and nearly a month to get professional photos for new listings. He and a cofounder started taking photos to serve busy real estate agents to learn what was needed and improve the quality and speed of delivery with technology.

Virtuance started with the vision of a software-only solution, but the business started growing with a high-quality, done-for-you service with a fast turnaround, powered by its technology, partners, and systems. The company grew steadily every year without any outside funding to eventually serve more than 20,000 real estate agents with 100 employees and more than 300 local photography partners.

This tech-enabled services company has SaaS-like gross margins. re-occurring revenue, and some profits In 2022, Jeff successfully sold Virtuance to Diakrit, a global real estate marketing technology company backed by private equity investors. Jeff stayed on for two years after the sale, until last month.

Quote from Jeff Corn, co-founder of Virtuance “The biggest reason that founders fail is that they actually fail to launch. The hardest thing to do is to fricking push your product and get it out in the world– because it’s messy. It’s certainly far from perfect, and it may not even work very well. But getting that feedback is so important to figure out what to do next.

“I see too many founders try to perfect it before they get it into the market. And then when it gets into the market, they might think it’s perfect, but the market may not. And at that point, they already invested too much in it. It’s not that we’re shipping something that we don’t think works; we are shipping something that we know checks just one of the boxes that our customers need.

“It’s just human nature that we want to put out good work, we have pride in our work. It’s one of the one of the real paradoxes of entrepreneurship is that we are all perfectionists and Type A personalities. We want to control it and we want it to be right, but also to be successful. The only way to succeed is to let go of some of that, to allow our teams to do the work, and be able to ship an imperfect product to get real feedback.”

• Jeff Corn on LinkedIn
• Virtuance on LinkedIn
• Virtuance website
• DIAKRIT website

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.

Mike Trasatti spent 10 years in the automotive dealer software business before he found an auto dealer in Iowa who had built is own complete software system. They partnered up in 2008, and Mike became the first CEO of the spinout software company, DealerBuilt.

DealerBuilt grew slowly as a bootstrapped startup in a market full of large incumbent competitors. They had a better approach to managing multiple dealers in a group with their dealer management system (DMS). DealerBuilt is powerful software that manages the entire financial operations of an auto dealer in the US.

They grew steadily to 450 dealer customers and 100 employees in 10 years before deciding to partner with ParkerGale, a private equity investor, to help them with their next growth stage in 2019. Mike continued as CEO until 2023, navigating through the COVID years and acquiring several “tuck-in” products to extend the DealerBuilt solution. Mike is now an independent advisor to DealerBuilt and other organizations.

“You’re constantly challenged in the entrepreneurial world. Do you really know what you’re doing? Self-doubt can be tremendously harmful to CEOs. I don’t think you can get into this business without a strong image of yourself and real confidence.

“But you have to balance confidence with humility because you’ll make mistakes. You’re going to have setbacks every week, and some very big ones, too. You can’t lose enthusiasm: You need enough confidence that you’re on the right path and that will carry you more than anything else. Those who don’t lose enthusiasm win.

“When you have both confidence and humility, you won’t be afraid to be around people who are better than you. And you’ll feel comfortable in that space, leading smart people who are championing your journey. They will look at you and think, I want to be there with you to champion this for you. That’s success as a leader.”

• Mike Trasatti on LinkedIn
• DealerBuilt on LinkedIn
• DealerBuilt website
• ParkerGale website – private equity investor in DealerBuilt

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.