Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Independent Pharmacies

**Fexingo** (0:01)
There are about 22,000 independent pharmacies in the United States, and according to the National Community Pharmacists Association, something like 40% of them still use paper logs for inventory management, not spreadsheets paper.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
That is wild. I mean, these are health care facilities handling controlled substances, and they're writing things down by hand.

**Fexingo** (0:24)
Right. And that's exactly the gap that a solo founder named Dana Chun spotted about three years ago.
She was working as a pharmacy technician in a small indie pharmacy outside Columbus, Ohio, and she saw every day how much time the pharmacist spent counting pills, checking expiration dates, reconciling orders, all on paper.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
So she built the software herself. Did she have a coding background?

**Fexingo** (0:49)
Not formally. She had taken a few online courses in Python and SQL, but her first attempt wasn't a pharmacy tool at all.
She tried building a consumer health app, something that would remind people to take their meds. It didn't get traction. But during that process, she kept coming back to the inventory pain point from her day job.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
It's interesting. The failed app gave her the skills to build the thing that actually had a market.

**Fexingo** (1:16)
Exactly. She pivoted in early 2023 and spent six weeks building a minimum viable product. It was a web app that tracked inventory, flagged low stock, and generated order lists. She called it RxCount. The first version was ugly.
She admits that. But it worked.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:36)
And the first customer? I'm guessing not a cold email.

**Fexingo** (1:40)
Cold call.
She literally called the pharmacy where she used to work, got the owner on the phone and said, I built something that will save you two hours a day. He agreed to try it for free. That was February 2023

**SPEAKER_2** (1:55)
And did it stick?

**Fexingo** (1:57)
It did. After a month, the owner said he couldn't go back.
And he introduced her to three other independent pharmacists in Ohio. That's how the first 10 customers came, referrals from that one early adopter.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:12)
So the unit economics, what was she charging?

**Fexingo** (2:15)
She started at $79 a month, then moved to $89 after adding compliance reporting. For context, a pharmacy might spend $300 to $500 a month on a full-blown system from a company like McKesson. So $89 was cheap enough that the decision didn't need multiple sign-offs.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:36)
Right? It's a no-brainer price point. But the real challenge is distribution.
How do you reach 22,000 independent pharmacies scattered across the country?

**Fexingo** (2:46)
This is where the story gets smart.
Dana realized that cold-calling every pharmacy would take years. So she looked at the supply chain. Most independent pharmacies order from regional wholesalers, companies like Cardinal Health or Amerisource Bergen. She approached a mid-size wholesaler in the Midwest and said, What if our X count came pre-integrated with your ordering system?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
So she turned a potential competitor into a distribution channel.

**Fexingo** (3:16)
Yep. The wholesalers saw it as a value add for their small customers. They agreed to a revenue share, 20% of each subscription for any pharmacy that signed up through their portal. That kicked off a much faster growth curve.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:31)
And that's a pattern we've seen before. Solo founders who can't afford sales teams find a partner who already has the relationship.

**Fexingo** (3:39)
Right. Two years in, our ex-count has about 340 paying customers. Monthly recurring revenue is around $30,000.
Churn is 1.2%, which is low, and part of that is because switching costs are high. Once a pharmacy imports all their inventory data, retrains staff, and integrates with their wholesaler, they're not going to switch for a $10 difference.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:04)
That stickiness is the dream in SaaS. And she bootstrapped the whole thing, no outside funding?

**Fexingo** (4:11)
Zero.
She kept her pharmacy job for the first 18 months, reinvested subscription revenue into development. She only quit 6 months ago when MRR hit 20,000 and she felt comfortable taking a salary.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:25)
That kind of discipline is rare. A lot of founders would have taken a small angel round to quit earlier.

**Fexingo** (4:31)
She told me she valued control over speed.
She didn't want investors pushing her to target chains or add features that didn't serve the indie pharmacist. And honestly, that focus shows in the product, it's not bloated.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:45)
What's the hardest part now?
At 340 customers, she's passed the early adopter phase. Now she's selling to the skeptical 8 majority.

**Fexingo** (4:56)
Exactly.
Her biggest challenge is convincing pharmacists who've been using paper for 30 years that software is worth learning. She started doing short video tutorials tailored to older users, slow, step-by-step, no jargon. And she offers a 30-day free trial with a dedicated onboarding call. That personal touch is something the big vendors don't provide.