How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS by Selling to Schools

**Lucas** (0:01)
You know that stack of permission slips your kid brings home? The one that inevitably gets lost or forgotten until the night before the field trip.

**Luna** (0:11)
Oh, I remember those.
My mom used to have to sign them in the car on the way to school.
It was a whole system.

**Lucas** (0:18)
Right. Well, one solo founder saw that chaos and turned it into a business.
Today, we're looking at a SaaS that digitizes permission slips and field trip management for K through 12 schools. The founder, let's call him Mike, built this as a side project while teaching computer science at a middle school.

**Luna** (0:37)
So he was living the problem. That's a classic pattern.

**Lucas** (0:41)
Exactly. He was the one collecting paper slips, chasing down parents, and reconciling lists. He knew the pain firsthand, and he knew that a simple web form could replace the entire process.
The product lets teachers create a permission slip, send it via e-mail or text, collect e-signatures, and track responses in real time.

**Luna** (1:05)
And it handles payments, too, for the field trip fees?

**Lucas** (1:09)
Yes. That was a key feature. Schools could collect money online instead of handling cash or checks. Mike launched in 2022 with a basic version he built over winter break.
He used a no-code tool for the front end and a simple database on the back end. No investors, no team, just him.

**Luna** (1:30)
So how did he get his first school to try it? Schools are notoriously slow to adopt new software.

**Lucas** (1:36)
He started with his own school. He offered it to his principal for free. They piloted it for one grade level, then the whole school. The administrative assistant loved it because it cut her data entry time by hours.
That success story became his case study. Then he reached out to other local schools through teacher Facebook groups and offered a free trial for one teacher.

**Luna** (1:59)
Free trial for a single teacher? That's smart.
Low risk for the school, and the teacher becomes your internal champion.

**Lucas** (2:07)
Precisely.
Mike's strategy was to get one teacher hooked, then let that teacher push for school-wide adoption. He priced it at $500 per school per year, not per teacher, not per student, just a flat school fee. That made it easy for principals to approve. No complicated per seat pricing that they'd have to calculate.

**Luna** (2:30)
And $500 is within the discretionary budget of most elementary schools. It's not a capital expense.

**Lucas** (2:38)
Right. And once the school adopted it, the stickiness was huge. Teachers set up their trips in the system. Parents saved their payment info.
Switching back to paper would be a pain. So renewal rates were over 90%.

**Luna** (2:53)
What about compliance?
Schools have to follow FERPA and sometimes state-specific privacy laws.
Was that a hurdle?

**Lucas** (3:02)
It was. Mike had to make sure data was encrypted at rest and in transit, and he signed data processing agreements with each school district. He also hosted on servers in the US only.
He actually blogged about his compliance journey, which helped build trust. That transparency became a selling point.

**Luna** (3:21)
Let's talk numbers. How many schools did he get to, and what did the revenue look like?

**Lucas** (3:27)
By the end of year one, he had 15 schools paying $500 each, so $7,500 in annual recurring revenue. Not life-changing, but he was still teaching full-time. By the end of year two, he had 120 schools.
That's $60,000 ARR. At that point, he quit teaching and went full-time on the SaaS.

**Luna** (3:50)
That's a slow burn. Two years to replace a teaching salary, but he didn't need venture capital.
He owned the whole thing.

**Lucas** (3:58)
And that's the beauty of it. No dilution, no board, no pressure to grow at any cost. He just focused on making the product better.
He added features like automated reminders, multiple language support, and integration with Google Classroom. Each new feature came from a teacher's request.

**Luna** (4:19)
So his roadmap was essentially user-driven. That's a luxury you have when you're small and your customers are vocal.

**Lucas** (4:26)
And he was a teacher himself. He spoke their language. He knew that teachers don't want another dashboard. They want something that saves them five minutes. So he kept the interface dead simple.
He also made it work on mobile, because teachers are often walking around the school.

**Luna** (4:44)
I'm curious about competition. There are big players like Blackboard and Power School, but they tend to sell to districts, not individual schools. Mike was going after the long tail of small schools that big vendors ignore.

**Lucas** (4:57)