John Stojka, Sertifi
From Losing 8 of 10 Deals to Winning With Niche SaaS
John Stojka is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sertifi, a niche SaaS product that enables companies to electronically sign contracts and collect payments quickly and easily. In 2008, John and his brother Nick had the idea of building an e-signature product. They landed their first customer, CareerBuilder, and quickly scaled to a thousand users within that single account. Things were looking good until they were served papers for patent infringement by a competitor that had raised over $500 million. Fighting that lawsuit took eight months and cost close to $150,000 - nearly all of their revenue at the time. After surviving the lawsuit, the brothers realized a bigger problem: they were a "me too" player in a crowded market, losing 8 out of 10 competitive deals to better-funded rivals like DocuSign and Adobe. John knew they needed to find a niche SaaS approach rather than competing head to head. He spent 12 months visiting trade shows across a dozen verticals - finance, real estate, insurance, home healthcare, and events. He settled on the events vertical because no competitor had saturated it yet, and customers had an additional pain point beyond signatures: they needed payment collection. Even within the 60,000-70,000 event companies in the US, John narrowed further to just 300 property management companies. The counterintuitive lesson was clear: the smaller the market, the faster Sertifi grew. With that niche SaaS focus, they went from $1M ARR to over $10M ARR, grew to 60 employees, and processed nearly $2 billion in payments - all completely bootstrapped. Their first events customer, Dave and Buster's, switched from a competitor specifically because Sertifi solved the payment capture problem that no one else addressed.
