How a Solo SaaS Founder Built a Business Selling to Bakeries

**Lucas** (0:01)
So, this week, I was digging into a SaaS that I honestly didn't think existed at scale, bakery management software. Not point of sale for a cafe, but specifically for bakeries that produce goods in a back kitchen and sell through multiple channels.

**Luna** (0:16)
Like bakeries that have a retail counter, wholesale accounts with coffee shops, maybe a farmer's market stand on Saturday. That's a different workflow than a restaurant.

**Lucas** (0:26)
Exactly.
The founder here is Mike Delgado, who was actually a pastry chef for about eight years before he built anything. He started with a single bakery in Portland, Oregon, and today he has just over 400 subscribing bakeries. The product is called BakeStack. It does production scheduling, ingredient inventory, and order management for wholesale accounts.

**Luna** (0:49)
He went from chef to coder. Did he learn to program specifically for this?

**Lucas** (0:55)
Yeah, he taught himself Python and a bit of JavaScript over about 18 months while still working the morning shift at a bakery.
His original motivation was frustration. The bakery he worked at used a whiteboard and sticky notes to track which cakes were due when. They'd overorder flour by 40% some weeks and run out of butter on a Saturday morning.

**Luna** (1:15)
That's the kind of pain point that makes you either quit or build something.

**Lucas** (1:20)
Right. So, he built a prototype for that one bakery. It was ugly. He describes it as a spreadsheet that got hit by a truck.
But it worked. The owner let him run it in parallel with the whiteboard for two months. After month one, the owner asked if he could install it at his second location.

**Luna** (1:39)
And that was the validation moment. Not a survey, not a landing page. Actual payroll savings.

**Lucas** (1:47)
Exactly.
Mike told me the second bakery cut its ingredient waste by 22% in the first quarter. That's a real number. He knew then that if it worked for two bakeries, it could work for more. So he spent the next year turning the prototype into a real product, quit his job and started selling.

**Luna** (2:06)
What was the initial pricing? I'm curious how he landed on a number without a lot of market data.

**Lucas** (2:13)
He started at $49 per month per location. Then he realized bakeries are really price-sensitive, margins are thin, especially for the small independent ones. So he dropped it to $29 and offered an annual plan at $290.
That's where it stayed for five years. He's raised it once by $5 for new customers only.

**Luna** (2:37)
And the turn rate? Because $29 is low enough that a bakery might not bother canceling. But it's also low enough that you need a lot of them to make a living.

**Lucas** (2:46)
He told me gross churn is under 4% per month. That's pretty solid for a microbusiness sess. And his gross margins are around 80%.
He uses a third-party hosting provider, no dedicated servers. At 400 locations, that's roughly $11,600 a month in recurring revenue before any annual plan discounts. Not a billion-dollar business, but a solid lifestyle company.

**Luna** (3:13)
That's a healthy little machine. How did he find those 400 bakeries?
I can't imagine he was cold calling every bakery in the US.

**Lucas** (3:23)
This is my favorite part. He tried Facebook ads. Too expensive. Cost per lead was around $18.
He tried cold emailing bakery owners. Almost nobody replied. The channel that worked was a two-line text ad in a trade magazine called Cake Decorator Quarterly.
Cost $150 per issue. He ran it for six issues and got 40 signups. That's $3.75 per acquisition.

**Luna** (3:52)
A print magazine in 2026
That's wild. But it makes sense. Bakery owners who are serious enough to subscribe to a trade magazine are probably serious enough to try software.

**Lucas** (4:04)
Exactly. And he built relationships from there. He'd call every new signup personally, walk them through setup, ask what features they needed. That's how he built a feature for managing cake orders with custom messages.
Because a bakery in Ohio asked for it. Now, 60 percent of his customers use that module.

**Luna** (4:26)
I love that. It's such a specific pain point. A bride ordering a wedding cake with a custom topper.
The bakery needs to track that in production without losing the sticky note. It's a tiny feature, but it's sticky.

**Lucas** (4:40)
And it's why his churn is low.
The product fits the workflow exactly because it was built from inside one. Mike told me he still bakes a batch of croissants every Sunday morning. He says it keeps him connected to the customer.

**Luna** (4:55)
Speaking of staying connected, these are exactly the kind of founder stories we love to dig into on the show.