How a Solo Founder Built SaaS for Veterinary Clinics

**Fexingo** (0:01)
There are roughly 30,000 veterinary clinics in the United States, and until a few years ago, the vast majority of them ran on paper files, white bards, and maybe a 10-year-old version of some generic practice management software that cost a fortune and required a server in the back room.

**Luna** (0:16)
That sounds like a perfect opportunity for someone who actually understood what those clinics needed day to day.

**Fexingo** (0:23)
Exactly, and that someone is today's subject. Her name is Maria Chun, and she founded a company called PetChart back in 2019
She was a veterinary technician for six years before she wrote a single line of code. She saw firsthand that the software her clinic used was built for human medical offices and then poorly adapted for pets.

**Luna** (0:46)
So she knew the pain points from the inside. What was the first thing she built?

**Fexingo** (0:51)
A simple appointment booking widget that integrated with Google Calendar and sent automated reminders via text. That was it.
She launched it as a standalone tool for $200 per month for the whole clinic. No commitment, no contract. She sold it to her own clinic first, then to three others in her city.

**Luna** (1:12)
200 per month for a whole clinic is pretty cheap. How did she get those first few customers outside her network?

**Fexingo** (1:19)
She cold called, but not randomly. She went to veterinary conferences and offered to buy lunch for any clinic manager who'd give her 15 minutes. She also joined every private Facebook group for vet practice managers and just answered questions.
Never pitched. That built trust. After six months, she had 20 clinics paying.

**Luna** (1:41)
That's a grind. But 20 clinics at 200 a month is only $4,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Not exactly a living wage in most cities.

**Fexingo** (1:53)
True. But she was still working part-time as a vet tech.
She kept costs near zero, no office, no employees, just a code editor, a cheap server, and her laptop. By year two, she had added prescription management and medical records templates. That allowed her to raise the price to 350 per month for the full suite. Churn was less than 5% annually.

**Luna** (2:17)
Medical records for vet clinics. That's a world of compliance headaches.
Animal health records have to be kept for years, and in some states the requirements are stricter than human health records for certain things.

**Fexingo** (2:30)
Right. She actually had to educate herself on state level veterinary record retention laws.
She built the system with automatic audit logs and secure offsite backups. That became a selling point. Larger clinics started calling her because they were worried about liability from lost files.

**Luna** (2:49)
So she didn't go after the big players. She stayed in the small independent clinic space, which is fragmented and often ignored by the big vendors like IDEX or Patterson.

**Fexingo** (3:01)
Exactly. The big companies sell integrated suites that start at $10,000 upfront and require annual contracts. Maria's product was monthly, no set up fee, and she offered a 30-day free trial with a personal onboarding call. That's a completely different risk profile for a small clinic owner.

**Luna** (3:21)
It reminds me of how Basecamp or MailChimp grew.
Simple, affordable, and human. What did she do when she hit 50 Clinics?

**Fexingo** (3:30)
50 Clinics was the inflection point. At 50, monthly revenue was about $17,500 and her costs were still under 2,000. She quit her vet tech job, but she didn't hire a sales team.
Instead, she built a self-service onboarding flow and started a referral program that gave the referring clinic a free month of service for every new clinic that signed up.

**Luna** (3:54)
That's smart. Veterinarians know each other. They talk at state conferences.
One happy clinic brings in three more.

**Fexingo** (4:03)
Yes. Within another year, she crossed 100 Clinics. That's about $42,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
At that point, she hired her first employee, a part-time customer support person who was also a former vet tech. The team now is four people all working remotely, and the product covers appointments, records, billing, inventory, and client communication.

**Luna** (4:29)
$42,000 a month with four employees is impressive, but I'm curious about the tech stack. Did she use any no-code tools to start, or was it custom from day one?

**Fexingo** (4:40)
She started with Ruby on Rails, a standard PostgreSQL database, and Twilio for text messaging.
Nothing fancy.
Her first version was actually a single-page app with a minimal interface. She intentionally avoided overengineering because she didn't know what features clinics would actually use.
She would release a feature, watch the usage data, and if nobody used it after a month, she'd remove it.