Krish Michaels

I bootstrapped a B2B SaaS company — from $50K in starting capital to $6M ARR and a sale to an industry leader. I ran mine solo for twelve — profitable every year — no co-founder, no outside capital, no dilution.

Since the acquisition, I work with founders on the building itself: strategy, direction, decisions, execution.

The foundations of business don’t move: know your customer, price with discipline, keep your promises, protect the margin, keep the operation sharp. What moves is where leverage lives — in the tools, the systems, the ways work is designed to build rather than just run.

So there’s one measure I never stop applying: is the business becoming more valuable? Not just in revenue — in defensibility, in clarity of direction, in the quality of what it’s building.

Whether you’re in tech or not, the technology choices underneath a business tend to show up in how it performs — in the margins, in how fast you can adapt when a vendor changes pricing, in the experience customers actually get.

SaaS works for parts of the business — fast to deploy, maintained by someone else. That trade-off makes sense everywhere except where you actually compete.

Bolt-on AI inside those systems has a structural limit: it only sees what that one system sees. A CRM’s AI knows your leads, not your margins. A model trained on your complete operating history will out‑predict one trained on a fraction of it — that’s the real argument for owning more of the stack and for treating data as an asset.

Timing matters. Building modular infrastructure before you have enough volume or history means paying for a data advantage that hasn’t accumulated yet. The payoff shows up when your own operating history is large enough that better predictions and decisions start to compound.