Engineering Founders

Building a vertically integrated Saas business from day 1 w/ Sean Stavropoulos @ Boulevard

Episode Summary

Sean Stavropoulos, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

Episode Notes

Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

ABOUT SEAN STAVROPOULOS

Sean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.

Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’

And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.

- Sean Stavropolous  

**ABOUT BOULEVARD

Boulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.

What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.

Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.

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