How a Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Museums

**Lucas** (0:01)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, there's a good chance you've noticed we don't run ads on the show.
That's deliberate. We'd rather the whole episode be about the founders' actual decisions, not interrupted by a mattress company or a meal kit pitch.

**Luna** (0:18)
And honestly, that's one of the reasons I love doing this show. It's just the two of us digging into the real mechanics of building something.

**Lucas** (0:26)
Exactly. So if you want to support that approach, there's a link by miacoffee.com/fexingo.
No pressure, no perks. Just helps us keep the conversations ad free. And today's conversation is a perfect example of why niche depth beats broad ambition.

**Luna** (0:44)
All right, I'm ready. Who are we talking about?

**Lucas** (0:47)
A solo founder named Claire, who built a SaaS product for small and mid-sized museums.
Not the big ones like The Met or The Smithsonian. Those have enterprise contracts with Salesforce or BlackBaud. She went after institutions with fewer than 50,000 annual visitors.

**Luna** (1:05)
That's a very specific slice. What was the product?

**Lucas** (1:10)
It's a combined CRM and donor management system, but built specifically for museums.
So it handles membership renewals, exhibition ticketing, donation tracking, and even grant compliance reporting. The key insight was that museums operate differently from say, a yoga studio or a car wash. They have this dual revenue stream of admissions and philanthropy, and most general CRMs don't handle that well.

**Luna** (1:35)
And Claire's background. She's not a typical software founder, right?

**Lucas** (1:40)
No.
She has a master's in art history and spent six years working in development at a small museum in Portland. She saw firsthand that they were using spreadsheets and a clunky old database called Past Perfect. Every month end, someone would spend three days reconciling donation records. She coded a basic prototype in PHP over a summer just to automate that one reconciliation.

**Luna** (2:06)
So the product came out of her own pain. That's always the best origin story.

**Lucas** (2:11)
Absolutely. She launched in 2022, solo, no co-founder, bootstrapped with $30,000 of savings.
First year, she signed eight museums. Each one paid $2,400 per year. That's about $19,000 in annual recurring revenue, not enough to live on, but proof the problem was real.

**Luna** (2:34)
How did she find those first eight? Cold email? Conferences?

**Lucas** (2:39)
Mostly cold email, but with a twist. She researched each museum's website to find the exact person, usually the development director or executive director. Then she referenced something specific, a recent exhibition, a grant they'd won, a capital campaign. Her open rate was over 60%.
Compare that to the average cold email open rate of around 20%.

**Luna** (3:05)
That's because she spoke their language. She wasn't some generic SaaS salesperson.
She was a former colleague.

**Lucas** (3:13)
Exactly.
And that domain expertise carried through the wholesale process. Museums have long decision cycles, often three to six months. But because Claire understood their budgeting cycles and grant reporting deadlines, she could time her follow ups.
She knew, for example, that many museums finalized their software budgets in October for the next fiscal year.

**Luna** (3:37)
So, she'd reach out in August to start conversations.

**Lucas** (3:41)
Right. By the end of year two, she had 42 museums paying. Average deal size stayed around 2,400, but she introduced a premium tier at 4,800 for museums that wanted custom grant reporting. About a quarter of her customers upgraded.

**Luna** (3:58)
What about churn? I'd imagine museums are pretty sticky if they bother to switch.

**Lucas** (4:04)
Churn rate is under 5% annually.
Once a museum imports all its membership data and trains its staff, the switching cost is high. Plus, Claire built integrations with common museum tools like Tesitura and Altru, so leaving would mean rebuilding those connections. That's a moat.

**Luna** (4:23)
And the revenue numbers now?

**Lucas** (4:25)
As of mid-2026, she's at about 500,000 in annual recurring revenue.
That's roughly 200 museums. She's still solo, though she contracts out customer support to a part-time person. She's never taken outside funding.

**Luna** (4:43)
500,000 ARR as a solo founder.
That's impressive. But I'm curious about the ceiling. How many small museums are there in the US alone?

**Lucas** (4:53)
According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, there are about 35,000 museums in the US.
Roughly 60% have fewer than 50,000 annual visitors. That's around 21,000 potential customers. Even if she captures 5%, that's over 1,000 museums, which would put her ARR above 2.5 million.

**Luna** (5:16)
And she doesn't need to capture all of them. The niche is big enough.

**Lucas** (5:21)
Right. And she's starting to see inbound interest from museums in Canada and the UK.