Hard Lessons on Bootstrapping a SaaS Business

Dave Rodenbaugh is the founder of Recapture, a SaaS product that provides abandoned cart recovery and email marketing for e-commerce merchants on platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.

Dave is a solo founder who has bootstrapped his SaaS business to mid-6-figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR). And his product has helped recover over $190 million for merchants of all different sizes across the world.

But before that, Dave had several failed attempts to build a SaaS business.

He spent $60,000 to acquire an early-stage SaaS product believing that he could grow it. But he ended up shutting it down and barely made back the money he'd invested.

He spent 18 months building another SaaS product but didn't talk to customers. And when he finally did start having conversations, he quickly realized that there wasn't a market for his product.

About 18 months later, he decided to try again and acquired another early-stage SaaS product which became Recapture. But he didn't understand his market, and it took him almost a year before he could start focusing on growing it.

In this episode, we talk about Dave's key mistakes and the lessons he learned from those experiences. We also dig into how he overcame some of the big challenges he faced in trying to grow Recapture.

I hope you enjoy it.