How a Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Veterinarians

**Fexingo** (0:01)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, today's episode is a textbook case of how to find a wedge in a market that looks impenetrable. We're talking about a solo founder who built a SaaS product for veterinarians, a space dominated by two massive incumbents, Idexx and Covetrus, who together control something like 70 percent of the practice management software market.

**Luna** (0:25)
That sounds like a tough sell. How do you even pitch a vet when they already have a system from a billion-dollar company?

**Fexingo** (0:32)
That's exactly the question the founder, a guy named Ryan, I'll use his first name only, asked himself. He was a software developer who'd been a veterinary receptionist in college. So he knew the workflow from the inside. The key insight, when a pet needs emergency care after hours, the general practices records have to be faxed or emailed as PDFs to the emergency hospital.
The slow, error-prone, and sometimes the ER never gets the full history.

**Luna** (1:02)
Right, because the two systems don't talk to each other. That's a classic interoperability problem, like in human health care.

**Fexingo** (1:10)
Exactly.
So Ryan built a lightweight, cloud-based bridge, not a full practice management system, but a dedicated patient record sharing platform. He called it VetShare. It lets the general practice push a complete medical history to any emergency clinic with one click, and the ER can request records on arrival. The whole thing costs each clinic about $99 a month.

**Luna** (1:35)
And what was the adoption curve? Did vets jump on it?

**Fexingo** (1:39)
Slow at first. He launched in 2022 and spent six months cold-calling clinics in his home state, Wisconsin. He got about 20 signups.
Then he discovered the channel that broke it open, Continuing Education Conferences for Veterinarians. He rented a booth at the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association Conference for 1,500 bucks. In one weekend, he signed 12 new clinics.

**Luna** (2:06)
That's a huge return. But it's also a very specific audience, vets who care enough to attend a conference on a Saturday. They're probably the early adopters.

**Fexingo** (2:17)
Exactly. And that's the lesson. He didn't need to convince every vet in America. He just needed the ones who already prioritize efficiency and are open to new tools.
From there, word of mouth among conference attendees did the rest.
As of this month, July 2026, Vet Share has 150 clinics on the platform, and it's profitable. Ryan still codes the front end himself on evenings and weekends, though he did hire a part-time customer support person last fall.

**Luna** (2:49)
150 clinics might sound small, but in the veterinary space, that's real revenue. At $99 per clinic per month, that's about $178,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Not bad for a side project.

**Fexingo** (3:05)
And the margins are high. He's on AWS with a simple database and a React front end. His monthly infrastructure cost is under $400.
So he's clearing north of $140,000 a year in profit. The interesting question is whether he can scale beyond that without taking funding.

**Luna** (3:26)
Well, and whether he wants to.
Some founders are happy with a lifestyle business. But the market for veterinary software is about $1.2 billion globally, growing at around 8% compound annual growth rate. If he can get to even 2% of that, we're talking $24 million in revenue. He'd need to hire a sales team, though.

**Fexingo** (3:48)
And that's the tension. Ryan told me he's talked to a couple of small venture firms, but he's wary of losing control.
He's seen what happened to other indie founders who raised money and then got pushed to grow at all costs. His goal is to add 10 clinics a month organically and maybe hire one more developer next year.

**Luna** (4:07)
That's a deliberate pace.
But it also means the incumbents could wake up and build their own bridge feature.
Idexx already has a product called VetConnect that shares lab results between clinics. It's not a stretch for them to extend it to full record sharing.

**Fexingo** (4:24)
It's a real risk. But Ryan's bet is that the incumbents are slow. They have enterprise sales cycles and legacy code bases. He can move faster and offer a better user experience. Plus, his platform is agnostic.
It doesn't care what practice management system the clinic uses. Idexx's solution only talks to other Idexx systems.

**Luna** (4:47)
So his moat is actually the interoperability he provides. That's clever. The more proprietary the incumbents are, the more valuable his neutral bridge becomes.

**Fexingo** (4:58)
Right. And he's also building network effects. Every new clinic that joins makes the platform more useful for every other clinic connected to it.
If your local emergency hospital is on vet share, you have a strong incentive to join too. That's the kind of dynamic that can create a defensible position even against much larger competitors.