How He Bootstrapped Dental Software to $16m

All sales are inbound; almost everything comes from dentists telling other dentists. They attend some dental trade shows, which 'produce a little bit'. Strong support (G2 reviews cited) keeps customers happy and referring. No paid acquisition described.

Zero outside capital. Deliberately grows 35-40%/yr at ~22-24% EBITDA ('rule of 70-80') rather than adding fuel; argues buying revenue gives a short-term hump and possibly the wrong customers, and a slow-moving market doesn't reward speed. Co-founder treats it as a legacy business.

Instead of replacing the dental PMS, sit on top of it: pull data from the PMS (Dentrix, Open Dental etc.), QuickBooks, phones and Google Analytics into business/revenue analytics that existed in medical but not dental. Integrate only with the five dominant PMS vendors, which cover the 70-80K target offices, rather than long-tail systems.

Cover the 'white space' around the PMS: analytics, online booking, intake forms, VoIP phones, payment terminals, websites, and now AI (call recording/transcription, intent and sentiment, AI receptionist). Customers build a package; voice, AI and payments layer on top of a basic operations core; most buy the larger packages.

Launched payments in 2025 via Adyen and Stripe card terminals, earning a take rate. Pitch to existing customers: card on file, PCI compliance, payment plans. Motion is outbound calls to installed offices that are on autopilot with bank/Costco processors; hiring people to drive it. Hardest part is SMB change management.

Plan: sell the full codified system for running a dental office (agents doing the work of 2-3 employees) priced as a percentage of the practice's revenue rather than per-feature software; not per-event outcome pricing, which they haven't considered.

For years he answered his dentist wife's business questions (treatment acceptance, marketing ROI, hygienist performance) with spreadsheets and SQL queries against her practice database, then built the analytics product in 2015 around those questions.