profile

Alex Turnbull

$0 to $5M ARR bootstrapped, solo founder. My new challenge: bootstrapping a new SaaS in public from $0 to $10M ARR in 3 years w/ 50%+ profit margins. Founder & CEO @ GrooveHQ.com & Helply.com šŸ‘‹ I'm Alex, and here's my story in a nutshell: - Founded 3 businesses: one sold for 8-figures, the other valued at $40M+, and my latest is just starting up - Early #buildinpublic founder with Grooveā€™s Journey to 100K blog - Featured in 100+ media outlets šŸ“ˆ $0-$5M ARR without funding with Groove šŸŽÆMy new challenge: Bootstrapping a new SaaS in public from Zero to $10M ARR in 3 years w/ 50%+ EBITDA šŸ’ø Sharing my learnings on building highly profitable, capital efficient, lean, bootstrapped SaaS business What you'll get by subscribing to my newsletter: šŸš€ Actionable tips to grow a profitable SaaS business šŸ“š Education around the future of AI in customer service šŸ”„ Transparent & actionable advice, no fluff šŸ’¼ Exclusive updates on growth Ready to build the highly profitable, capital-efficient, bootstrapped SaaS of your dreams? Iā€™ll be sending a weekly newsletter documenting my journey from Zero to $10M ARR with Helply and business growth tips + tricks - so hit that ā€œSubscribeā€ button!

Featured Post

We solved the ā€˜data sourceā€™ problem for training AI agents šŸ’Ŗ

Hey Reader, Most AI agents fall short because the data behind them is weak. You donā€™t know what to train them on. Or you add what you have, but arenā€™t sure if itā€™s sufficient. And thatā€™s where it breaks. Itā€™s a data source problem. When we set out to build Helply, that was one of our biggest findings; lack of optimized data was killing AI agents. We went out and solved that problem with Knowledge Bridgeā„¢. Knowledge Bridgeā„¢ runs your support tickets against your knowledge base, finds the gaps,...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter is powered by Helply. Helply answers customer questions 24/7 so you can focus on more important work. Join the VIP program and we'll guarantee 50% resolution rate in less than 60 days. $180K VP of Sales. Zero sales. $200K dev. No product shipped. My $2M lesson in hiring backwards. I burned millions trying to ā€˜look like a real companyā€™: Here are some of the expensive hires that killed my runway: VP Sales ($180K base) when we had...

Today, I walked the founder of a Y Combinator unicorn company through a fascinating a-ha moment. I was setting his company up in Helply and he discovered something most companies never find: A way to autonomously identify and fill knowledge gaps. Instead of the usual generic AI setup where you ā€œcrawl your website and call it a day,ā€ something different happened. Helplyā€™s AI: analyzed their support history identified 50 specific knowledge gaps and filled them systematically. For the first...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter is brought to you by Helply. Most support teams donā€™t realize it, but outdated knowledge bases bleed time and money. Helply changes that. Our AI auto-detects missing answers, updates content, and keeps your support accurate without the manual grind. No more endless rewrites or frustrated customers. Ready to see the gaps in your system? Book a call and weā€™ll audit it live. No fluff. Just real insights. From LinkedIn message to...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter is powered by Helply, the AI support solution for growing companies. We help you scale support, deflect tickets, and cut costs while keeping customers happy. We are working hands-on with 100 companies to build, train, and launch AI support agents in just 30 days. Want in? Book a call now to join our VIP Slack program. Software engineering jobs just died. Not slowly. Not gradually. They dropped 70% in 18 months. Hereā€™s the reality...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter is brought to you by Helply (the AI support solution built for growing companies). We help you scale support, deflect tickets, and cut costs, without sacrificing customer experience. We are working 1-on-1 with 100 companies to create, train, and deploy your AI agent in 30 days. To join our Slack VIP program book a call here (it's free). I was deep in the weeds, staring at our product roadmap, knowing we had a big challenge in...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter is brought to you by Helply. The AI support solution built for growing companies. We help you scale support, deflect tickets, and cut costsā€”without sacrificing customer experience (and without scaling costs). Join our VIP program and we'll help create, train, and deploy your AI agent in 30 days (at no extra cost to you). Only 100 spots available. Apply here. I turned down every VC check for 12 years to keep 92% ownership of...

The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter If we could show you a list of support articles to create based on the most common questions coming through your help desk, would that be helpful? How it works: We upload your knowledge base ā€“ Your existing articles are imported into our tool. We analyze your past support tickets ā€“ We pull in 12 months of ticket data to find patterns. We run a diagnostic ā€“ Our system identifies missing articles your customers are asking for and gaps in existing content that...

When a VC-backed founder becomes a ā€˜thought leaderā€™ right after their ā€˜9-figure exitā€™, hereā€™s what they arenā€™t telling you: We sold the company for $100M (their ā€œ9-figure exitā€) But we had to pay our Series A/B investors $63M We also paid our seed investors $10M Then, we divided $27M between 3 - as weā€™re 3 co-founders Thatā€™s $9M each With 37% capital gains tax; thatā€™s another $3.3M less So $5.7M pre-debt But since we didnā€™t take a salary for the first 2 years and had to take a $500K personal...

Iā€™m 43. After 12 years bootstrapping, growing Groove to $5M ARR, and leading a team of passionate builders, Iā€™ve made just about every entrepreneurial mistake in the book. Here are 10 pieces of brutally honest founder advice (I wish someone had told me day one): 1. Create one true believer. To get traction, you donā€™t need 1000 customers or investors. You need one customer who believes in you. Find them, deliver exceptional value, and theyā€™ll become your biggest evangelist. 2. Data beats...