#8: Bootstrapped to $100M exit with just one employee - Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke created, grew, and sold his software company in a most unusual and successful way:

He grew WebMerge to $4M revenue by just himself in 6 years before hiring his first and only employee, a strategic sales rep. It's an incredible "bootstrapped unicorn" success story that ultimately was worth $100M when he sold WebMerge in 2019.

WebMerge was an online service that automates document creation to automatically fill in any documents with merged data from any source. WebMerge automatically generates PDF and Microsoft Word documents. Think of it as "mail merge for the web."

Jeremy's first employer, Formstack, ultimately acquired WebMerge to bring Jeremy back to the Formstack team and renamed the product to Formstack Documents.

In this episode, Jeremy explains:

• How he came up with the idea and pitched it to his employer before building it on his own
• How he grew revenues to $1M ARR before he quit his day job as a full-time software programmer
• What it was like to grow a $5M+ ARR SaaS business without  any other employees or Slack groups or constant meetings
• How many years in a row he raised prices before he found the right price
• How he grew awareness and conversion efficiently by integrating with other apps and appearing in their add-on marketplaces
• What it was like to sell his company to a private equity (PE) buyer in two phases

Check out all our episodes and articles at https://practicalfounders.com.