Startups For the Rest of Us Episode 814 | How to Beat a Venture-Backed Competitor (with Laura Roeder)
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Jan 6, 2026 In this engaging discussion, Laura Roeder, founder of Paperbell and a pioneer in self-serve tools for coaches, shares insights on how her bootstrapped company triumphed over a $10M venture-funded rival. They explore why her competitor invested too heavily in engineering while neglecting marketing. Laura emphasizes the importance of focusing on the right customers and how limited paths for scaling impacted the competition. With clever strategies and efficient operations, Paperbell not only held its ground but emerged as the market leader.
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Bootstrapped Market Leader Emerges
- Laura Roeder launched Paperbell in 2020 as a self-serve SaaS for coaches and grew it to low millions ARR.
- The product processes $47M through customer payments and remains fully bootstrapped and tiny-team driven.
Self-Serve Is Hard But Intentional
- Self-serve SaaS is hard but can fit founders who prefer lightweight, lifestyle businesses.
- Laura deliberately chose self-serve despite the difficulty because she enjoys serving individual creators and coaches.
Lean Engineering Matches Core Needs
- A single engineer can build the core product for many niche SaaS markets.
- Practice built mobile apps and a large team, while Paperbell matched core functionality with one engineer for years.