Dallas Software Podcast

Raution Jaiswal is the CEO and co-founder of InsuredMine, a fast-growing software company based in Plano, Texas. Raution worked in management roles at large financial institutions before moving to Dallas in 2015 to become a Director of M&A for CBRE, a leading commercial real estate services company. He discovered a problem experienced by small insurance agencies and worked to evaluate the opportunity before leaving CBRE to start InsuredMine in 2017. InsuredMine provides an all-in-one sales CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing automation software for independent insurance agencies in the US. InsuredMine helps improve and automate marketing, sales, and service to help insurance agencies sell more, serve customers better, and become more profitable. It also integrates with many popular agency management systems and other popular tools. In this episode, Raution talks about how he found and verified an acute pain experienced by insurance agencies to start a software company with 30 employees already. You'll hear how Raution hired his first development team, why he hasn't raised any outside funding, what's happening in the insurance industry right now, and his plans for growth at InsuredMine.

Sam Knight was president and co-founder of BOLT Software, a project management and scheduling software for the construction trades that build residential homes. Sam moved to Dallas with his family in his teens and attended Texas A&M for several years before venturing out to the working world to feed his entrepreneurial passions. Sam helped lead the BOLT team as it grew before the company was sold and now he guides the BOLT product in the larger company. BOLT Software was created in 2015 after years of internal use at a large Dallas-based electrical contractor. Founder Josh Causey brought in Sam Knight to spin out and run BOLT as a separate software company and grow the customer base and improve the product. Through 2020, the company grew to over $1M in recurring revenues before it was acquired in 2020 by Fort Worth-based ECI Solutions to expand its construction software offering. Built by the trades for the trades, BOLT is a SaaS solution that simplifies project management, scheduling, and estimating for new home construction subcontractors (electricians, painters, plumbers, etc.). BOLT helps those subcontractors truly manage their teams: from rescheduling due to unforeseen delays to scheduling out multiple crews simultaneously. In this episode, Sam tells the story of how BOLT was created for internal use before it became a startup company on its own, how they found a focus selling to unserved trades businesses, how they kept expanding and selling, and how BOLT was eventually acquired by ECI Solutions while it was still a growing company.

Chris Kern is Managing Director of Windstream Partners where he advises startup and early-stage tech business owners in selling their companies for under $50M. Chris got his start on Wall Street working on large finance and acquisition deals, but he quickly shifted gears 25 years ago, moved to Phoenix, and worked only with small software companies in the fast-growing technology business. Chris is an expert independent advisor who has helped over 150 growing tech companies get financing, obtain investment, or sell their companies. I have known Chris for over 15 years.  There are 10X more software acquisitions for under $50M than the few billion-dollar deals we hear about in the news, but we just don't hear about the smaller ones that create so many successful life-changing outcomes for founders.  In this special "Ask the Expert" episode of the Dallas Sofware Podcast, I ask Chris the top questions that Dallas startup founders ask me about selling their company when they are still small: What's happening right now in mergers & acquisitions of software, SaaS, and fintech companies that sell for $10M to $50M? What are common valuations ranges for software startups and small companies with revenues between $500K and $5M? What are the factors that affect valuation one way or the other? Can you really sell a startup for 5X revenues when it's still small? Who is buying these smaller software companies? How does the process work to sell your company? What are the pitfalls that founders make? What should they be thinking about before they try to sell? Is it better to have outside funding or to have bootstrapped when selling your company?

Mike Stacy has been CEO of ID90 Travel since 2011. Mike has a long history leading and growing online travel businesses, including Travelocity, CheapTickets.com, Groopie.com, and others. Mike is originally from Michigan. He and his family have lived in the Dallas area for over 10 years. ID90 Travel is the leading travel booking app for airline employees to book airlines, hotels, cars, and cruises using their employee flight privileges and other discounts. Airline companies reduce the internal costs of managing employee travel bookings. ID90 was founded in 2009, funded in 2013, and is based in Southlake with 75 employees. In this episode, Mike shares the story of how ID90 was founded to solve a specific internal problem for airline companies, how ID90 grew with an expanded strategy and strategic funding, and how ID90 survived the travel downturn of 2020. Mike shares his 20-year background in the online travel booking industry and why he and his family love living in the Dallas area.

Stan Golubchik is CEO and co-founder of ContraForce, a cybersecurity software startup based in McKinney. Stan grew up in Dallas but he was born in Uzbekistan in the former Soviet Union. His family moved to Dallas as religious refugees when Stan was two years old. Stan is a graduate of UT Dallas and has been in the cybersecurity business for over 10 years.  ContraForce was founded in late 2020 and already has active customers, seven employees, and some angel (and co-founder) funding. The ContraForce platform complements existing security tools and provides comprehensive visibility and helps IT teams at mid-sized companies to quickly respond to threats with automated AI-driven incident responses. ContraForce is a recent graduate of the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator and is currently raising a seed round of funding.  In this episode, Stan shares his perspective on the current state of cybersecurity threats,  modern security solutions, and how Contraforce is providing a specific solution to help small and midsize companies. He also describes his experience in the Y Combinator incubator in the summer 2021 cohort. 

Wale Mafolasire (pronounced Wall-AY Mafo-LAH-shee-ray) is the founder and CEO of Givelify, the most popular online giving platform and mobile donation app. Wale grew up in Nigeria before coming to Georgia to study computer science at Columbus State University. Wale started Givelify in 2013 with his co-founders after experiencing the difficulties of making donations at his local church and other non-profits. He and his team created Givelify to make giving easy and rewarding for generous people while helping non-profits reach a wider audience of donors who ignore traditional donation processes. Givelify is now the most popular online and mobile giving platform with an easy donation app and a powerful donation management system. Over one million people have donated $3 billion to 55,000 churches, non-profits, and other causes using Givelify. Givelify has over 90 employees in offices in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Dallas, Texas, with more remote employees all over the world. Givelify is bootstrapped and has not taken outside venture capital investment. In this episode, Wale talks about he started the company with friends from college in 2013, trying unsuccessfully to raise venture funding to launch the company, how his own pastor was the first Givelify customer, and growing to over 55,000 non-profits with the most popular giving app on the iPhone and Google app stores. He also talks about how generosity and supporting non-profits can be enabled with a frictionless experience to make donating a more common practice all over the world.

Will Robinson is the CEO of fast-growing Encapture, a 20-year old document management services company that made the shift to a SaaS product company in 2019 with additional investment funding. Will is a Dallas native who spent time in banking and private equity as a financial professional before starting in the software business and then joining Encapture as CEO. Encapture is an intelligent document management software that helps financial institutions and healthcare providers to speed up document processing. Encapture makes it easy for front-line workers to capture any type of documents, then all the relevant data is automatically extracted using machine learning to process workflows and integrate data with other software tools. In this episode, Will shares his journey from Dallas to Wall Street banking and then back to Dallas to lead a growing software company. We talk about the challenges of moving a 20-year old professional services business into the SaaS business focused on software products, the benefits of raising money from "patient family office investors," hiring in a fast-growing company in Dallas, and more.

Bo Sijuade is CEO and co-founder of On Touch Go, a mobile advertising platform based in the Dallas area. Bo grew up in North Dallas with parents who immigrated from Nigeria to lead major technology projects in large healthcare companies. Bo started On Touch Go in 2019 with two other co-founders who are also technical and entrepreneurial.  On Touch Go is a mobile outdoor advertising platform that reaches audiences on the go: in Uber and Lyft rideshare cars, in hotels, bars, and other venues. On Touch Go is an up-and-running startup with hundreds of advertisers and hundreds of mobile screens in the Dallas area.  In the episode, Bo shares how they got their mobile advertising startup and running in the year of COVID, the challenges of raising investment capital as a new startup, how he is handling tough challenges as a first-time entrepreneur and an introvert, and where he sees the mobile advertising industry going in the next few years. 

Chuck Gibbs is the founder and chairman of ChildcareCRM, one of the leading global software providers that serves the childcare industry. Chuck is a serial founder of industry-focused software companies, including software businesses for the oil and gas industry. Chuck started ChildcareCRM in 2010 and is now chairman after bringing in experienced SaaS CEO Matt Amoia to lead the company in 2020. (Check out the Dallas Software Podcast interview #2 with Matt Amoia). ChildcareCRM is the leading CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing software designed specifically for the childcare industry that dramatically increases inquiry-to-enrollment rates. The fast-growing Las Colinas company is funded by growth equity venture investors and currently has over 50 employees. In this episode, Chuck shares his self-funded journey of identifying a worthy problem, creating their first software solution for early customers, growing the company to $3M annual revenues, bringing in investment partners to grow bigger, and then hiring an experienced CEO to take the company to the next level. Chuck shares savvy insights for new founders on bootstrapping, hiring, funding, and more. 

CEO Danny Martin and CTO Rose Johnson are co-founders of fast-growing Esposure, based in Desoto in the Dallas area. What's more, entrepreneurial Danny is Rose's son This son-mom team has been leading their software and services business in the exciting esports industry. Esposure started as an esports production business that now has a new software platform that is growing fast. The Esposure learning and education platform helps people learn the skills to get jobs in the fast-growing esports industry. Their framework of experiential learning principles covers technology, management, marketing, production, and competition subjects with collaboration and assessments. Tune to this episode to hear about how Danny got into the esports business almost 10 years ago, then grew a business producing esports competitive events, then brought on his mom Rose to launch their educational software platform when COVID hit in 2020, and now they growing their business to help people get into the global esports industry.

Maan Hamdan is the founder and CEO of Hexa Global Ventures in Richardson, Texas. Maan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and came to the US to study at the Univerity of Texas in Austin. After working for two large technology companies in Dallas, Maan started his entrepreneurial journey, founding the HR software company HRSmart and growing it to over 2000 global clients, 400 employees, and a successful exit in 2015. Maan started Hexa Global Ventures in 2018 to help serious tech entrepreneurs in Dallas grow their startups to scale more successfully. Hexa Global Ventures is a “full-stack” venture support organization that provides funding, advisory, marketing services, development talent, operations and sales support, and a thriving community at their venture space in Richardson. Hexa currently has 20 companies in the portfolio and has already taken one startup to a successful exit. In this episode, Maan tells the story of his journey from Lebanon to Texas, then working for big tech companies, then starting his own software company in Dallas. It was a crazy journey with a happy ending, fueling his desire to help more entrepreneurs avoid the pitfalls that prevented his company from growing faster.  

Shaun Simon is the founder and CEO of ServiceGanja, based in Dallas. Shaun started ServiceGanja in March 2020 after working at several tech startups in sales.  Shaun is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma. ServiceGanja is a software platform for cannabis dispensaries to manage their retail operations with an all-in-one platform that includes point of sale, guest marketing, digital ordering, and delivery. Service Ganja has grown fast without outside investment funding to serve hundreds of cannabis dispensary customers in their first year in business. In this episode, Shaun shares his startup journey that started the first week of the COVID shut down in March 2020, then rewriting of their software after testing with early beta customers, to their fast growth without outside funding, and his vision to grow a big software company in Dallas that serves the growing cannabis industry.

Howard Getson is President and CEO of Capitalogix, based in Coppell, Texas. Howard was a corporate lawyer before starting Intelligent Control Corp., his first software company, which he sold in 2000. After some life-changing transformations that same year, he started Capitalogix in Coppell, Texas. Capitalogix is a proprietary trading software using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technology that is like a "Hedge Fund-In-A-Box." Capitalogix relies on high-frequency research with a database of trillions of performance records to identify the trading candidates with an edge in different markets or trading conditions. In this episode, Howard shares his experience with his first company called Intellagent Control in the 1990's, dealing through multiple personal crises at the same time, then starting and growing Capitalogix as a hedge fund trading system using artificial intelligence and big data. 

Stephen Boudreau is the co-founder of RaiseDonors. He was the co-founder of web development agency Ascendio in Coppell, Texas which grew for 15 years before the team created RaiseDonors and grew the business. RaiseDonors is an online fundraising platform for non-profit organizations. RaiseDonor digital donation pages connect donation transactions to common non-profit CRM, marketing, and payment software to track all fundraising campaign activity and donations. RaiseDonors was acquired by Virtuous Software in December 2020. In this episode, Stephen shares the story of starting a digital web development agency, solving important customer problems, launching the RaiseDonors product for non-profits, improving the software product incrementally for 10 years, and eventually selling the company.

Mike Pratt is CEO and co-founder of Panamplify, a Dallas SaaS startup that serves medium-sized marketing agencies with an automated client reporting solution. Panamplify automatically builds stunning and meaningful reports so agency teams can focus on adding value not building PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets. Mike started his career in the Air Force and then joined Goldman Sachs in New York City as a trader and analyst. He moved to Dallas in 2010 to start a digital marketing agency that served large companies. At his agency, he discovered the time-consuming problem of monthly client reporting that Panamplify solves. In this episode, Mike talks about the challenges of automating an existing manual management process, building software with a small team, and building communities of tech leaders in Dallas.

Matt Amoia is CEO of ChildcareCRM and a veteran leader of fast-growing SaaS companies. Matt and his family moved to the Dallas area in 202 when he joined ChildcareCRM as CEO. He was recruited by Chuck Gibbs, the founder of ChildcareCRM and current chairman of the company.  ChildcareCRM is the leading CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing software designed specifically for the childcare industry that dramatically increases inquiry-to-enrollment rates. The fast-growing Las Colinas company is funded by growth equity venture investors and currently has over 50 employees.  In this episode, Matt and I discuss how the founder Chuck Gibbs started the company and grew it fast, how Matt was brought in as CEO to scale the company faster, what happened in their industry during the COVID crisis, their growth plans, and how he works with the original founder of the company. 

Dr. Tye and Courtney Caldwell are the cofounders of ShearShare, the leading on-demand salon and barbershop space rental app. Recognized as tech visionaries and beauty industry pioneers, the Caldwells' mission is to help fellow beauty and barbering professionals around the world maximize their earnings potential. ShearShare is a space-as-a-service marketplace app that allows certified beauty and barbering professionals to rent empty space in beauty salons, barbershops, and spas by the day, week, or occasion in more than 850 cities. Over 30,000 independent professionals and salon owners are active on the ShearShare platform. ShearShare is based in McKinney, Texas, in the North Dallas area. In this episode of the Dallas Software Podcast, this husband-and-wife team shares their journey from salon owner (Dr. Tye) and tech marketing executive (Courtney) to starting a software business together in Dallas. They talk about how they got started and how they proved the industry need for their business model, overcame the COVID downturn in the beauty industry, raised funding, and expanded their team.