Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 728 | Bootstrapping Gymdesk to a More Than $32.5M Exit
Tue, 27 Aug 2024
In episode 728, Rob Walling interviews Eran Galperin, founder of Gymdesk, about his incredible exit. Eran shares his journey of transforming Gymdesk from "Martial Arts on Rails" into a successful gym management software company. He discusses how they succeeded in a competitive market, the role of TinySeed in their growth, and how feelings of burnout eventually led to a majority buyout for the company. Topics we cover: 2:02 – Gymdesk Announces a $32.5 Million Strategic Growth Investment 5:13 – How the investment will be used 6:38 – Eran’s projects before Gymdesk 9:21 – Sticking with one idea long enough to see success 12:45 – Entering a competitive market 16:37 – Rapid growth as a marketing leader 20:54 – Dealing with burnout and entertaining an acquisition 26:45 – Handling a stressful sales process 32:19 – The future of Gymdesk Links from the Show: Apply for TinySeed Gymdesk Announces a $32.5 Million Strategic Growth Investment from Five Elms Capital Episode 727 | Gymdesk Sells for More than $32.5 million, Hiring Gets Easier, and More Hot Take Tuesday Topics Gymdesk.com Eran Galperin (@erangalperin) | X Eran Galperin | LinkedIn Eran’s Website Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Explained: How It Works Discretion Capital If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
Full Episode
It's startups for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. And this week, I talked to Iran Galperin, the founder of Gymdesk, about how he bootstrapped and frankly, mostly bootstrapped Gymdesk to a more than $32.5 million exit. It really is an incredible story of Iran launching this product on the side and working for years, nights and weekends, until it clicked.
And this is a good example of if he had launched it and expected it to just work in a month or three months and was launching 10 things, Gym Desk would not be where it is today. It was the sheer focus and the relentless execution and showing up
night after night, weekend after weekend, until he could quit his day job that got Jim Desk to such an incredible, life-changing, generational wealth-generating opportunity. I sometimes have tiny seed founders on this show, not because they are tiny seed founders, but because they have really interesting stories.
And most tiny seed founders are also part of the Startups for the Rest of Us and the MicroConf community, and Iran is no exception. I do ask Iran why he applied to TinySeed in this episode, and you'll hear his answer. If you feel like TinySeed could be a fit for you as a bootstrapped SaaS founder, head to tinyseed.com slash apply.
We are opening applications for our fall batch within the next week, and that will run for about two weeks. If you hear this after September of 2024, you can always go to tinyc.com slash apply to get on our email list and learn about our next open enrollment.
In addition, if you are an accredited investor and you're interested in investing in companies like Gymdesk, ambitious B2B bootstrapped SaaS founders, head to tinyc.com slash invest. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Iran. Hey, Ron Galperin. Welcome to the show. Hey, Rob. How's it going? It's good, man. It's been a long time coming. I'm glad to have you on here.
So folks have probably noticed from the title of this episode that you had a $32.5 million strategic growth investment from Five Elms Capital. And I want to start the show by asking you, what did it feel like that moment where you've refreshed your bank balance and you saw more zeros than you probably ever imagined that you would have?
It's surprisingly a large feeling of relief. It was the end of a very grueling, even though not long, maybe in comparative terms, but for me, long process of three months where basically every day I doubted that this would actually end up well. And many times, as sort of a psychological trick, I would kind of let myself feel, so what if it falls apart? It's all good.
And when the money actually hit the bank account, actually, it happened very fast. We closed the deal on a Friday, 30 minutes before the wire cut off time. And the funds were in the bank account the same day. I did not expect that before the weekend. And I'm just like, I guess it's over. I guess it's done. I can have a real night's sleep today and maybe the entire weekend.
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