#139: Bootstrapped Founder is Getting Ready for the AI Wave at $20M ARR - Shalin Jain

Listen to this episode from Practical Founders Podcast on Spotify. Shalin Jain is the founder and CEO of HappyFox, a successful bootstrapped company that provides modern help desk management software for customer service, support, and IT management organizations. Shalin and his small team in India built many successful products from 2000-2010, then focused on HappyFox and moved to the US in 2011. HappyFox is a mid-market product that sells across industries and departments with an efficient product-led growth (PLG) approach. The product has matured with successful add-on products for live chat, AI support, business intelligence, and workflows. The company has over 2200 customers, 110 employees, and now $20 million in revenue. Shalin plans to keep growing and leverage modern AI technology to become a much bigger company based on the disciplined product culture they have created. Quote from Shalin Jain, founder and CEO of HappyFox “I think software and its pricing need to be deflationary, just like hardware, where memory prices, hardware prices, and server prices have all been deflationary. But we are now going through a phase where software is actually getting more and more expensive. “With the advent of AI and automation, software will become cheaper and more usage-driven. So, the best survivors in that phase would be the efficiently run companies that have not bloated themselves by charging more today to have more employees and spend more on ads. “I believe software needs to get cheaper because it's getting cheaper to run software every day; it's getting cheaper to outsource to AI and build stuff with the help of AI as well. So software cost should not go up; it should go down.” Links Shalin Jain on LinkedIn HappyFox on LinkedIn HappyFox website The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com.