{"podcast":{"title":"Scaling Up with Fexingo: How Small Businesses Become Mid-Market Companies","slug":"scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589","podcast_index_feed_id":7871589,"rss_url":"https://feeds.fexingo.com/business/scaling-up.xml","website_url":"https://www.fexingo.com/","image_url":"https://audio.fexingo.com/business/scaling-up/cover.png","author":"Fexingo","episode_count":77,"summary":"Lucas and Luna anchor themselves on a mezzanine balcony, surveying a floor of empty desks below, as they dissect the exact financial and operational thresholds that separate a small business from a mid-market contender. Each episode isolates a single case—a specialty manufacturer in Ohio, a regional dental chain, a software consultancy in Austin—and walks through the specific revenue inflection points, debt structures, and hiring sequences that mark the transition. Lucas, a journalist who has covered private-company growth for a decade, presses on the numbers: at what EBITDA multiple does a bank change its lending criteria? How does a payroll of 40 versus 150 alter your tax liability? Luna, with a background in operations, tests those numbers against real friction—the founder who lost control of culture after a Series A, the CFO who swapped QuickBooks for NetSuite too late. They never promise a formula; they examine why some companies stall at $10 million and others blow through $50 million. The listener is someone running a 30- to 200-person firm, or an investor evaluating that space, who is tired of 'growth hacking' and wants the actual ledgers. Can you scale without diluting th…","last_synced_at":"2026-06-27T12:19:03.505596+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589"},"episode":{"title":"How a Pet-Sitting App Bootstrapped to 50 Thousand Bookings Without VC","slug":"how-a-pet-sitting-app-bootstrapped-to-50-thousand-bookings-without-vc","published_at":"2026-06-08T03:57:09+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589/how-a-pet-sitting-app-bootstrapped-to-50-thousand-bookings-without-vc","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589","url":"https://audio.fexingo.com/business/scaling-up/episode-0038.mp3","audio_url":"https://audio.fexingo.com/business/scaling-up/episode-0038.mp3","summary":"Episode 38 of Scaling Up with Fexingo examines how Rover's earliest competitor—a pet-sitting platform called PetBacker—grew from a single sitter in Dubai to over 50,000 bookings in 30 countries without venture capital. Lucas and Luna unpack the founder's counterintuitive decisions: why he refused to raise money, how he used referral loops instead of paid ads, and why the company still has no sales team. The episode drills into one specific number—$4.7 million in annual recurring revenue on a shoestring budget—and shows how a marketplace can scale organically when the unit economics are tight. If you're bootstrapping a two-sided platform, this one has a few surprises. #PetBacker #Bootstrapping #MarketplaceGrowth #PetSitting #StartupScaling #OrganicGrowth #ReferralMarketing #UnitEconomics #DubaiStartup #NoVC #BusinessScaling #SmallBusinessGrowth #MidMarket #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #ScalingWithoutVC #BootstrappedStartup #FounderStories Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo","meta_description":"Episode 38 of Scaling Up with Fexingo examines how Rover's earliest competitor—a pet-sitting platform called PetBacker—grew from a single sitter in Dubai…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":523,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589/episodes/how-a-pet-sitting-app-bootstrapped-to-50-thousand-bookings-without-vc/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-up-with-fexingo-how-small-businesses-become-mid-market-companies-7871589/how-a-pet-sitting-app-bootstrapped-to-50-thousand-bookings-without-vc.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}