#159: Co-Parenting App Reaches $10M ARR Through Pure Bootstrap Growth - Vince Mayfield

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Aug 29, 2025

Vince Mayfield, cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents, discusses the journey of creating a co-parenting app designed to enhance communication between divorced parents. He shares insights on achieving over $10 million in annual recurring revenue through bootstrap funding. The conversation highlights the app's role in reducing conflicts and improving accountability. Vince emphasizes the importance of customer feedback in refining pricing strategies and evolving the company as it grows. He also reflects on the need for adaptability and lifelong learning in the startup world.

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ANECDOTE

How TalkingParents Started

Stephen Nixon brought an early, scrappy MVP from his house and proved demand by getting ~1,000 users.
Vince and Lewis rewrote it, invested ~$1M from BitWizards, and formed TalkingParents together.

ANECDOTE

Equity Split And Funding Mechanism

The founders structured equity as 33% each and TalkingParents repaid BitWizards for initial development.
BitWizards acted as discounted outsourced dev and funded early rebuild costs.

ADVICE

Monetize Early With Subscriptions

Switch to a subscription model instead of relying on ad revenue when unit economics fail.
Build mobile apps and charge customers for clear value to make recurring revenue scale.

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Vince Mayfield is cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents, a co-parenting app for communication and coordination used by divorced parents raising children. Cofounder Stephen Nixon was a lawyer with family cases who recognized the need for a secure, unalterable communication record to improve co-parenting and family harmony.

He pitched a development company owned by Vince and Louis Erickson to build the first app. They came together to cofound TalkingParents in 2012. Stephen worked with judges, courts, and lawyers to build awareness and get their first customers. The app records and stores all communications between co-parents, including chats, message, phone calls, and calendars. The company started growing and eventually became profitable as word spread, they charged more for the product, and the app improved.

TalkingParents is now a profitable and growing company with well over $10 million in revenue, 65 employees, 100,000 paying customers, and 500,000 people using the app. They are self-funded with no outside funding.

Quote from Vince Mayfield, cofounder and CEO of TalkingParents

“The company you are when you have 5 million in revenue and maybe 40 people, it's not the same company you are when you've got 20 million in revenue and say 80 people. It's not. You've got to iterate and change.

“And you've got to have the stamina for that. You've got to be willing to put in the effort and do that. Yeah, exactly. There's no shortcuts to this.

“I love it when people tell me, I've got an idea and I'm going to start up and it's going to go viral overnight. And my first thought is bulls--t. It's not going to happen that way.

“It's much harder than everybody thinks. You hear about the overnight success, but what you don't see is the 10-year grind that it took to get there. And the sacrifice and delayed gratification that goes along.”

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