Episode 786 | Questions About Bootstrapping SaaS to a $90M Exit (with Kevin Wagstaff)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do you really know when you’ve hit product-market fit? In this episode, Rob Walling welcomes back Kevin Wagstaff, co-founder of Spectora, to answer listener questions about early traction in Facebook groups, finding product-market fit, handling criticism, and what it really took to bootstrap to a $90M exit. Want to get your questions answered? Drop them here. Topics we cover: (3:15) – Early traction using Facebook groups (7:17) – The tradeoff between growth and work-life balance (12:26) – Participating inside Facebook groups run by rivals (14:39) – Ranking for niche SEO terms (19:06) – Funding the early days through consulting (25:14) – Surviving churn in a seasonal, high-turnover market Links from the Show: SaaS Institute Mark Cuban Blog Post Kevin Wagstaff | LinkedIn Kevin Wagstaff (@KevinWagstaff3) | X Spectora If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Startups for the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. In this episode,
0:04.5	I talk once again with Kevin Wagstaff, the co-founder of Spectora. And if you recall, he was on the show
0:11.2	just a month or two ago talking about how he and his brother bootstrapped their SaaS to a $90 million
0:18.8	exit. In that episode, I made a call for questions
0:22.6	if you had any questions about how Kevin got where he's trying to go.
0:26.9	And I received an email filled with an entire episodes worth of questions.
0:31.8	It turned out to be a really great conversation.
0:34.2	I think you enjoy it.
0:35.5	Before I dive into my conversation with Kevin, if you ever
0:38.5	wished that you had an outsider's advice from someone who's been in the trenches of trying to grow
0:44.1	your SaaS past $1 million, $2 million, 3 million, ARR, then you should check out Tiny Seeds
0:50.2	SAS Institute. That's at SaaS Institute.com, and it is our premium coaching and mastermind
0:57.0	community, where you're going to get all the advice, the camaraderie, the mastermind interactions,
1:03.1	and one-on-one coaching that you want. It's exclusively for founders doing one million ARR and up,
1:10.2	and it's only SaaS founders.
1:12.2	We're currently forming our next mastermind group, and we have one or two slots left.
1:19.0	We're still in the early stages of Institute, and so if you want to get in on the ground floor
1:23.6	as a founding member while the community is still small and you'll get a ton of one-on-one
1:28.6	attention.
1:29.6	You should check out SaaS Institute.com.
1:32.4	And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Kevin.
1:43.9	Kevin Wagstaff. Thanks for coming back on the show.
	...

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