#177: Building Multi-product Vertical SaaS With a Tiny Team - Robin Eissler
Practical Founders Podcast
Market Size and Product-Market Fit
Robin estimates 50–60k booster clubs in the U.S., targets large half of them and explains product-market fit benefits.
Robin Eissler is the founder and CEO of BoosterHub, a vertical SaaS platform built for high school booster clubs. After selling her prior business as a private jet broker, Robin volunteered to run a local booster club and discovered a messy problem run with spreadsheets, emails, and manual accounting. She decided to build a single system that could actually handle it.
BoosterHub now serves nearly 600 booster programs, representing over 100,000 users. With just two full-time employees and a small dev team, the company processes more than $40M in transactions across payments, fundraising, merchandise sales, and accounting. Annual contract value typically runs $1,500–$2,000 per customer, with strong retention and expanding usage.
Still independently-owned and bootstrapped, BoosterHub is approaching $1M ARR and profitability. Robin shares lessons on building complex software with a tiny team, selling to volunteer buyers, surviving seasonal revenue swings, and why slow, compounding growth can create durable SaaS businesses without venture capital.
Key Takeaways
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Tiny Teams Work - Two employees plus contractors can build serious SaaS with focus, systems, and modern tooling.
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Sticky Beats Big - Hundreds of small customers compound more reliably than a handful of enterprise deals.
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Seasonality Is Real Education-adjacent - SaaS must survive cash spikes and winter slowdowns without panic.
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Founder-Led Marketing - Consistent content from the founder still drives inbound growth in niche markets.
- All-In-One Wins in Verticals - Being the system of record makes churn low and customer value expand naturally over time.
Quote from Robin Eissler, Founder and CEO of BoosterHub
"The numbers are much better than what we projected. so we're starting to see that compounding effect is really what's happening is there's just enough users and enough people in the system that they're using more of the add-on products and we're processing more volume.
"So it's starting to have that compounding effect. And so I really just admitted to myself this month, like, I think we're seeing it.
"I think we're finally seeing it. I feel like, OK, maybe for me, it's almost that I can exhale. I've been holding my breath for four years, so maybe I can breathe."
Links
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