Own Pain Startups

Wealth Factory, founded by Garrett Gunderson in 2006, is a virtual family office for entrepreneurs doing $1-10M in revenue that helps them optimize cash flow and keep more of their earnings. After refocusing the company following a tragic plane crash that killed two co-founders, Gunderson built a consulting-based model where clients pay $10,000-$150,000 for comprehensive financial advisory services. The firm limits new client acquisition to 10 per month and focuses on deep customer intimacy with around 125-250 clients.

ConverSocial is an enterprise SaaS platform that helps large consumer brands deliver customer service through social media and mobile messaging channels. Founded by Josh March (who previously sold i-Platform to a UK agency in 2012), the company has raised $20 million in capital and serves approximately 250 enterprise customers including Google, Sprint, Hertz, and Hyatt Hotels with ARR exceeding $10 million.

Youths is a location-based mobile advertising company founded in 2008 that helps global brands target consumers at specific geographic locations like airports and retail outlets. By 2016, the bootstrapped company had grown to over $1M in annual revenue with a 15-person team based in Vietnam, serving approximately 30 agency customers through a CPM arbitrage model and partnership-driven sales strategy across 60+ countries.

Full Circle Insights is a B2B SaaS company founded by Bonnie Crater and three co-founders in 2012 that helps marketing teams measure and track campaign impact on pipeline and revenue. Built on the Salesforce platform with just $22,000 in initial capital and sweat equity, the company has grown to $4M ARR with 150 enterprise customers, achieving a 90% renewal rate and a six-month CAC payback period through event-driven sales and partnerships.

Thunkable is a Y Combinator-backed no-code mobile app builder founded by MIT/Google engineer Arun Saigel in early 2016. The platform enables non-technical users to build mobile apps without coding, competing in a crowded space with a focus on underserved SMBs and individuals. Having raised $3.3M and built a team of 10 in San Francisco with millions of platform users, the company was preparing to monetize through a paywall charging users for premium features like analytics, in-app purchases, and app store deployment.

Vidyard is a video marketing platform founded in 2010 that has grown to serve over 1,000 customers across three offices (Vancouver, Boston, Waterloo). The company has raised $70M in funding and is more than doubling year-over-year revenue while maintaining 85-90% gross margins through economies of scale and strategic product expansion. Growth is driven by personalized video prospecting, referrals, and a freemium Chrome extension called ViewedIt that has reached 100,000 users since October.

YAP is a SaaS platform for event applications launched in 2012 that serves the professional events industry (MICE - meetings, incentives, conferences, events). The company charges $400 per app per year with volume pricing up to 50 apps, and has published over 85,000 apps since launch while remaining profitable and bootstrapped with a remote team of five. Maria Seidman grew the company through unconventional guerrilla tactics, including sneaking into conferences as an attendee to sell directly to event organizers.

Picatiki is an event ticketing SaaS founded in 2008 by Jayesh Parmar with a freemium model targeting nonprofits and community organizers with a free product, while monetizing through commission-based Pro and enterprise API offerings. The company raised $1.5M total and achieved $1.2M in revenue (4% of $30M gross ticket revenue) in 2016, with plans to break $60M in gross ticket revenue in 2017 through 100% YoY growth driven by newly hired VPs of Growth and Sales focusing on enterprise API customers.

Bright Funnel is a B2B marketing measurement and attribution platform founded in late 2012/early 2013 by Nadim Hussain. Chris Mann joined as Head of Product in January 2016 and became CEO in April 2017. The company has grown to $3 million ARR across 70 customers with an average contract value of ~$50K, positioning itself as a neutral attribution platform for enterprise B2B marketers.

Book in a Box is a publishing service founded in 2015 that helps busy professionals and speakers write and publish books without spending years writing. By interviewing authors and converting their spoken content into professionally published books, they've grown to work with 500 authors in 2.5 years, generating $11.3 million in cumulative revenue with no debt or VC funding. They've scaled to 30 full-time team members and 100+ freelancers, averaging 25-30 new books per month.

First Blood is a gaming platform built on blockchain that allows amateur gamers to compete against each other for money. The company conducted one of the fastest ICOs in crypto history in September 2016, raising approximately $5 million in under 5 minutes by selling 465,000 ether at $11 per token. The team liquidated 80% of the raised ether (372,250 tokens) immediately to fund operations, converting roughly $4 million into USD for salaries, marketing, and platform development.

Christoph Jentzsch, a theoretical physicist and early Ethereum contributor, co-founded Sloc.it in 2015 to enable decentralized sharing economy through blockchain and IoT integration. After learning hard lessons from the failed DAO project, he pivoted to building software that sits on top of IoT devices (like smart locks and EV charging stations), allowing asset owners to receive payments via smart contracts. The company raised $2M in seed funding in early 2017 and deployed its solution on over 1,000 EV charging stations.

Foursquare transformed from a hot consumer social network (valued at $650M in 2013) into an enterprise location intelligence powerhouse under CEO Jeff Glick's leadership starting in 2016. The company monetized its 70,000 free developer community through a tiered SaaS licensing model based on API calls, with over 90% of revenue now coming from B2B customers including Fortune 500 companies, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and ride-sharing platforms like Uber. Their Pilgrim technology, built on nearly 12 billion cumulative check-ins (7 million per day), enables contextual mobile marketing and real-time foot traffic analysis that has made Foursquare an essential infrastructure layer in apps across the globe.

Cameron Harald is a business growth consultant who coaches high-level CEOs and executives to scale their companies. Starting with a $80,000 annual retainer as his baseline fee (doubling for larger clients like Sprint's second-in-command), he has helped companies like Justix grow from $80 million to $250 million in revenue over four years. He also generates income through book royalties (50,000 copies of "Meeting Suck" sold in the first year), speaking fees ($30,000 per engagement, up from $7,500), and equity stakes in portfolio companies.

Bugsnag is a B2B SaaS crash monitoring platform founded by James Smith in February 2013 that helps companies detect and fix errors in their software applications. After bootstrapping to profitability in 6-9 months with $4.5K MRR, they raised $9.5M in venture capital (Series A from Benchmark for $7.2M) and grew to 4,000 paying customers and 60,000 total users. The company has achieved over $2M ARR with healthy metrics including sub-1% logo churn and net negative revenue churn, growing primarily through word-of-mouth and freemium adoption.

Poseidon Asset Management is a venture capital firm founded by Emily Paxia and her brother Morgan in 2013, focused exclusively on investing in the cannabis industry. The fund has grown from $20 million to approximately $25 million under management, making late seed and early Series A investments while achieving a 40-44% internal rate of return over 3.5 years. With 30 active companies in their portfolio spanning business technology, agriculture technology, and consumer engagement solutions, the firm targets the rapidly growing cannabis market that Emily saw as a significant white space of opportunity.

Miracle is a SaaS platform launched in 2012 that enables large retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and Urban Outfitters to operate their own third-party vendor marketplaces on their websites. The company has raised $22M in equity funding and serves over 125 customers across 25 countries, using a percentage-based pricing model tied to incremental revenue generated through the marketplace. Adrian Nossenbaum bootstrapped the initial development with proceeds from his previous exit (Split Games to Fnac) and built a 160-person team focused on enterprise B2B sales with a sub-one-year payback period target.

Hirewire is a mobile-first marketplace connecting job seekers and restaurants/hourly employers, founded by Joe Wynn in 2015 after he sold his previous company Campus Special for $25M. In their first year beta in Atlanta (Jan 2016), they acquired 4,000+ employers, 100,000+ job seekers, and placed 20,000 people in jobs, with over 50% organic growth. They've raised $4.1M and charge employers $50-$100/month per location, expecting to reach ~$200k/month in revenue soon.

Jumeo is a SaaS platform providing trusted identity verification services (ID verification, identity verification, and document verification) primarily for merchants in the sharing economy, fintech, and online gaming sectors. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO Stephen Stude since 2015, the company has raised $60 million and serves 350-400 customers across 40 countries with a 1,500-person team. Growing 46% year-over-year, Jumeo processed 26 million identity verifications in 2016 and is on track to exceed 30 million in 2017.

Riskalyze is a SaaS platform launched in 2011 by Aaron Klein that helps financial advisors align client portfolios with their actual risk tolerance using a quantitative "risk number" score. The company achieved $24M in total capital raised (mostly bootstrapped until late-stage institutional funding), serves 19,000+ paying financial advisors at $145/month base pricing, and maintains industry-leading 90%+ annual retention by focusing on solving the behavioral finance problem of investors making poor short-term decisions driven by fear and greed.