Practice by Numbers · B2B · software for dental practices
Stay bootstrapped and grow 35-40% a year instead of buying revenue
$12.5M ARR, 22-24% EBITDA, ~$1.5M free cash flow in 2025
What they did
What happened
In their words
How He Bootstrapped Dental Software to $16m
… like small growth. How can you grow faster? It is small growth. First of all, remember we are bootstrapped completely. So there's- Well, congrats, that's awesome. Yes, thank you. And there's not a single dollar that's been taken. So we're very careful about growing it right. This year, last year was a good profitable year. This year will be even a better profitable year. We're looking at 35, 40% growth. So we're making a rule of 70, 80 company.
We are comfortable. We don't want to break anything. And also all of our sales are inbound, right? Meaning it's all word of mouth. We go to some shows, shows produce a little bit for us, but almost everything is people telling other people. So with that, could we grow faster? Of course, we could put fuel to the fire and grow faster. Will that be the right set of customers? Perhaps. There's no reason for us to take risk because we are growing at a very profitable,
very quick pace. People are happy. They're supported. If you look at FG2 reviews, they get the support that they need. And it's a slow moving market. If it's a slow moving market, Why do you want to just buy your revenue? That's what I don't like is just buying your revenue because that gets you that short-term hump. And as you can see, we are in it because of Aditi. And this is very important to her, right? So it's not just growing it as fast as possible and then getting up. And she's building this as a legacy for her. I love that.
What were profits in 2025? 2025, we were at about EBITDA was about 24, 22, 23 or 24. course, we haven't really fully closed the books yet, but there was a free cash flow of about 1.5 last year. I just have to congratulate you both. I interviewed thousands of founders, and it's just so refreshing to hear a company in a specific niche with subject matter expertise, bootstrapped, playing the long game, profiting with scale over 10 million of ARR. …
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More from this episode
- Grow on dentist referrals, great support and a few trade showsARR ~$2M -> $12.5M from 2021 to 2025
- Add analytics on top of the software dentists already use, not replace itBecame the wedge for the later all-in-one platform
- Grow one tool into an all-in-one suite sold as packages~$12-13K per location a year on average; up to ~$18-19K
- Call existing customers to switch their card payments to you for a cut~$190M processed of ~$2B possible; profitable but switching is hard
- Charge a percentage of the practice's revenue instead of per-feature fees
- Answer a real business owner's data questions by hand before building
Tags: bootstrapped, profitable-growth, rule-of-40, no-paid-acquisition