Kevin Wagstaff and his brother Michael turned a $5,000 investment into a $27 million ARR home inspection software business—without raising venture capital for the first six years.

After nine months of customer research, they built Spectora by focusing on one philosophy: serve before selling. Kevin answered every support message within 60 seconds for five years, showed up daily in online communities without pitching, and even took a 6AM Sunday demo that unlocked their biggest growth wave. Today, Spectora serves 12,000+ inspectors while Kevin has stepped back from the CEO role, recognizing he was best suited for the zero-to-10 journey.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 The SEO Head Start: Why writing content 12 months before launch created an unfair advantage.


• 🛠️ The Agency Wedge: How building 200+ websites manually became a critical wedge to sell software.


• 💰 Pricing Wars: How to convince an old-school industry to switch from one-time fees to monthly subscriptions.


• 🤝 Community Growth: The strategy of being the "first to comment" in Facebook groups for 12 hours a day.


• 🛑 Founder Transition: Recognizing when you are the bottleneck and how to exit gracefully to Private Equity.

📖 Chapters

• The "Zero to 10" Founder Mindset


• The $5k Bootstrap Origin Story


• 9 Months of Customer Interviews (That Actually Worked)


• The MVP: Focusing on Workflow vs. Features


• The "Smart Home Inspector" SEO Strategy


• The Agency Wedge: Building Websites to Sell Software


• Serving vs. Selling: The 10-Year Trust Game


• The 6 AM Sunday Demo: Doing Things That Don't Scale


• The Failed $10k Ad Experiment


• Raising Capital via Private Equity (Secondary Offering)


• Stepping Down as CEO

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