How Practice by Numbers Bootstrapped to $12.5M ARR with 1,300 Dental Customers (Interview with CEO Rohit Garg)

Bootstrapped from Day One: $0 Raised, $12.5M ARR

Rohit Garg

00:00I got involved in dentistry through marriage. My wife is a dentist. She's a co founder. There's a lot of little, little, little things that a dentist who's never really trained to be a business owner, they have to make all these decisions. What we're trying to get done is take all that white space and give them a practice in the box. Remember, are bootstrapped completely, so there's not a single dollar that's been taken. We're gonna end this

00:23year at about $16,500,000. The future is brighter today than it was a year ago.

Nathan Latka

00:33Hey, folks, my guest today is Rohit Garg. He's the co founder of Practice by Numbers, an all in one dental practice SaaS platform trusted by over 5,000 dental professionals for analytics, patient communications, marketing payments, and more. Rohit, you ready to take us to the top?

Rohit Garg

00:47>> Yes, absolutely.

Nathan Latka

00:48All right. How did you build the software? Were you running your own dental practice before this and got frustrated?

How Marriage to a Dentist Sparked the Idea

Rohit Garg

00:54You know, I got involved in dentistry through marriage. My wife is a dentist. She's a co founder, and she opened a practice in 2010. And I just got slowly involved with it. I'm like, oh, this is dentistry is quite, quite, quite interesting because I have a medical imaging background and slowly helped her being a good husband on the weekends and answering her questions and helping her understand the numbers. And just slowly, in 2015, realized that there

01:18is a big opportunity here. Dentistry is such a massively under tapped market in terms of technology and software. We kind of launched it in 2015.

Nathan Latka

01:27>> Were you working in the dental office with her as well, or you just hear stories back at home?

Rohit Garg

01:31No, I would just hear stories. I was working for Philips Healthcare, I would just hear stories, Hey, what should I do here? Or, What should I do there? I'm like, Well, go look at the data. Go look at

Nathan Latka

01:40>> What was she saying? Give me a sense of what some of the problems were that she was bringing to you.

Rohit Garg

01:43Well, she was trying to figure out, hey, what's going on with treatment acceptance, for example? What's going on? Is my sudden marketing working or not? Or am I spending money in the right place? Is my hygienist doing the right thing? There's a lot of little, little, little things that a business owner, like a dentist who's never really trained to be a business owner, they have to make all these decisions that they can't. And they don't have

02:06the right data. They don't have the right skills to make those decisions. And that's what she would come to me and I would run stretch sheets, and I would run, you know, SQL queries for her in the in in the database, in the back end, and try to figure out, give her answers.

The Problems Dental Offices Couldn't Solve Alone

Nathan Latka

02:20>> Which of these solutions did you build first? I'm sharing your website right now.

Rohit Garg

02:24The Numbers part was built first, right? And the whole business analytics was built first, right? Business analytics, the practicetQ portion of it, the revenue analytics, be able to mine the data. This exists very heavily in the medical space. It just didn't in the in the dental space. So, we built that on the dental space side.

Nathan Latka

02:41>> What databases were you mining for data, or what other tools in the space were you trying to connect with APIs and webhooks, that your wife could put together these dashboards?

Rohit Garg

02:50It's the their PMS, the their practice management systems, to be able to bring out all the information from their practice management system, from their QuickBooks, from the phones, from the Google Analytics. You try to bring this three sixty degree view of the practice to understand really what's going on, what decisions you should be making.

Nathan Latka

03:06>> And those management systems are like are those your competitors today, or are there other ones out there?

Rohit Garg

03:10These are the systems we sit on top of, right?

Nathan Latka

03:13>> So, case of

Rohit Garg

03:15those are our competitors. The case of healthcare, for example, you would sit on top of an Epic or eClinicalWorks. In case of dentistry, we sit on top of, Dentrix or Open Dental, like equivalent to, what, it would be for medical.

Nathan Latka

03:29>> And why doesn't Dentrix, with the age of AI, why don't they just build their own version? In other words, see, where's the value going to accrue over time? Is it going to be you, the aggregator of all the data? Or is it going to be the specific like, you know, you know, Dentrix that's going to expand vertically?

Analytics Was the First Product Built

Rohit Garg

03:43Yeah. And I think they have tried and they do have their own solutions as well. But obviously, since we focus very heavily on this, we have better solutions. They have what I would say is a key, it'll get you from point A to point B. It doesn't have all the detailed depth analytics of it trying, trying to really look for Cadillac of what you're trying to get done you'd come to practice the numbers if you just

Sitting on Top of Practice Management Systems

Rohit Garg

04:07look on basic reporting you would go to Dentrix. So that's why what we have is our, our customers are almost two x of national average, right, in terms of the volume of the production that they do. Because You

Nathan Latka

04:19>> mean the revenue they do?

Rohit Garg

04:20The revenue of what they do, because they come to us to really find that depth of analytics, the depth of now, obviously, Practice by Numbers is not just an analytics system anymore, right? Because what it is, is an all in one system because we cover all the white space, right? So, think about it this way. A dental office would have a BMS, right? Dentrix or an open nettle, they would have an analytics system maybe in the

04:43last ten years, then they would have online booking system, they would have forms intake, they would have a phone like a VoIP like a Nextiva or a Vonage. They would have payment POS terminal. They would have websites. So, what we're trying to get done is take all that white space and give them a practice in a box. Sit on top of the PMS and then give them everything. And that's what PBN has built out now. And

Why Dentrix and Open Dental Are Partners, Not Competitors

Rohit Garg

05:06now what PBN is doing from this point onwards is trying to add all the AI. So, being able to, so for example, the phones, every single phone gets recorded, transcribed. We understand what their intent is, what their sentiment was, and then the air receptionist is going to come out. So, what we the speed at which we move so the question for you that you asked is, how come these Dentrix and OpenNote? Because they just can't move

05:29at the speed at which we can move. They don't have the technical skills or even the people to be able to build software the way we can.

Nathan Latka

05:35>> So, one of the ways that I try to understand is someone truly the integrator of data in their space? So, I just go to their footer, or I go to their integrations page, and I see how many they have listed. You only have five listed here. Do you actually have a lot more that you're just not listing?

Rohit Garg

05:48So, dentistry, even though it's quite fragmented, it is dominated by the five that we have listed. You could co integrate with somebody who has like a thousand locations. That doesn't really move the needle. So, that's what we are focusing on right now is to get seventy, eighty thousand dental offices covered.

Nathan Latka

06:05>> What's the average dental practice paying you today?

Rohit Garg

06:08>> So, at this point, we are reaching about $12,000 to $13,000, and that's the average.

Nathan Latka

06:13Per some year?

Rohit Garg

06:14>> Yes, per year. And some people raise reach almost all the way to like $17,000 to $18,000 Some customers who are paying us $100,000 right? So, I'm talking about per location. And some customers have one location, some customers have 40 locations.

Nathan Latka

06:32>> Okay. So, your largest customer would be 40 locations times 18,000 per year, which would be 720,000 per year just from that one customer. Is that right?

Rohit Garg

06:40Not quite. Our largest customer is about 250,000 because they don't have all the features, right? Because you can build the build the model you can build your package accordingly. You can layer on voice. You can layer on AI. You can layer on payments. As you keep layering on everything, you get to about $18,000 to $19,000

Practice in a Box: Seven Products Consolidated Into One

Nathan Latka

06:57>> Do you have an upsell motion that's tied to jobs that you're actually doing for the dental offices? You know, number of intake forms completed, number of new customers, number of phone calls resolved, things like that.

Rohit Garg

07:09No, we are not charging outcome based in terms of number of events. That's an interesting thought. We have not really thought about it. I don't know if there's an appetite that somebody would accept that. So, are doing it more based on, as you see, different packages, right? The core is a very basic, flow is, again, operations oriented. Most practices, what they end up buying for a mass is scale or thrive.

Nathan Latka

07:33>> Do you sit on the payment flows of the dental offices? Can you see which dental offices do the most revenue?

Rohit Garg

07:38We know how much they do, how much they collect, how much don't they collect, how much goes to debt. We can see all of that.

Nathan Latka

07:45>> Rohit, when you look at the total ecosystem you sit on, what's the dollar volume that dental offices are processing through your company today on an annual basis?

Rohit Garg

07:53So, we just launched the payments product last year. So, the GMV that we have is about $190,000,000 But what's possible in our system is close to about 2 ish billion dollar of additional or total GMV possible in our system at this point. And and as the as the number of locations grow, that GMV opportunity also grows.

Nathan Latka

08:16>> How do you know the opportunity is 2,000,000,000?

Rohit Garg

08:19Because we are able to look at what their collections is, right? And we are able to figure that math out to say, hey, this is the number of locations. This is the average number of collections per location. We have to do a little bit of fuzzy math because not all the money is GMB because a lot of the money is coming in from insurance carriers. They come in as part of Medicaid. Because it doesn't, it's not

08:39quite gets run through the credit card terminal.

Nathan Latka

08:42>> Are you installing the physical credit card terminals or do you use software, I mean hardware with your software installed?

Five Integrations Cover 80,000 Dental Offices

Rohit Garg

08:49So, we are working with companies like Adyen and Stripe, and so we do install the credit card terminal through them, and we have a take rate through Adyen and Stripe. And so, it's quite profitable.

Nathan Latka

09:01>> The 1,800,000,000 of GMV that you see on your system that you're not processing directly yet, you're only processing 200,000,000, you said. How are they currently processing it, and how do you get them to switch over to you?

Rohit Garg

09:12It's an upsell motion. We just we are strapped for resources. So, we're trying to hire the right people so we can actually drive that upsell to be able to call these offices. Because the offices are on autopilot, right? They have whatever they have through Costco or through Bank of America. And they're not super interested in switching unless you show them the value. And there's significant value of having integrated payments, right? Because we can do card on

09:36file, you can become PCI compliant, you can do payment plans. There's a lot of value in being integrated, but getting through and making them switch is the hardest one. And change management in the small business is the hardest thing to do.

Nathan Latka

09:48>> How many individual customers, not all locations, but the top level customers are you working with today?

Rohit Garg

09:53So, top level customers, we have about 1,300 to 1,400 top level customers.

Nathan Latka

10:00>> Okay. And that represents what, about 5,000, 6,000 locations?

$13k Average ACV, $19k Fully Loaded Per Location

Rohit Garg

10:03That represents about 2,000 locations and about 5,000, 6,000 providers.

Nathan Latka

10:08>> What is a provider? Give me an example at a dental office.

Rohit Garg

10:12Like a dentist, a periodontist, an orthodontist. You have multiple doctors in there.

Nathan Latka

10:17>> Can I take the 1,300 customers that you just gave me times that ACV average? You gave me 13,000 a year. That puts you at like, fifteen, sixteen million ARR today. Is that about right?

Rohit Garg

10:27We will end the year at about 16.5.

The $250k Customer: 40 Locations Under One Logo

Nathan Latka

10:31>> How does that make you guys feel? I mean, that must feel amazing launching in 2015.

Rohit Garg

10:36It does. COVID kind of didn't help us, right, because we we were glowing, glowing, and COVID kind of cut us at our knees. So we had to relaunch the company in 2021. So we kind of were at $2,000,000 at 2021, at the end of twenty twenty one. And now we're gonna end this year at about $16,500,000.

Nathan Latka

10:53>> When did you break your first million of revenue? Do you remember?

Rohit Garg

10:56I think we broke the first million in 2018. So, in about about fourteen months, I think we were at a million. And 2018 and '19 went well, and everybody knows then what happened in 2020.

Nathan Latka

11:08>> And then 2021, you had to relaunch at about 2,000,000 of ARR, then you start growing after 2021. Do you remember what you finished, like, 2023 at?

Rohit Garg

11:15I think we almost doubled it in in that. Think we were close close to 4 ish at that time.

Nathan Latka

11:20>> So that means 2024, you probably ended, what, somewhere around 8,000,000?

Rohit Garg

11:24That's right. Yes.

Nathan Latka

11:25>> We're recording here in April 2026. Your target this year is to end at 16,500,000 of ARR. Where did you end 2025, December ARR?

Rohit Garg

11:33Oh, about 12 and a

Nathan Latka

11:35>> 12 and a okay.

11:36So, I just I feel like you guys are you're in you have a good location, good niche, good product, killer team, husband, wife team I mean, killer team. Why can't why can't you grow faster than that? 12,500,000 to 16,500,000 feels like small growth. How can you grow faster?

Rohit Garg

11:51It is small growth. First of all, remember we are bootstrapped completely. So,

Nathan Latka

11:55>> there's Well, That's awesome.

Rohit Garg

11:57Yes. Thank you. And there's not a single dollar that's been taken. So, we're very careful about growing it right. This year Last year was a good profitable year. This year will be even even a better profitable year. We're looking at 35, 40% growth. So, are meeting a rule of seventy, eighty company. We are comfortable. We don't want to break anything.

$190M GMV in the First Year of Payments

Rohit Garg

12:18And also all of our sales are inbound. Right. Meaning it's all word-of-mouth. We go to some shows. Shows produce a little bit for us but almost everything is people telling other people. So, with that, could we grow faster? Of course, we could we could put fuel to the fire and grow faster. Will that be the right set of customers? Perhaps. There's no reason for us to take risk because we are growing at a very profitable very

12:44quick pace. People are happy. They are supported. If you look at our G2 reviews they get the support that they need. And it's a slow moving market. If it's a slow moving market why do you want to just buy your revenue? That's what I don't like is just buying your revenue because that gets you that short term bump. And as you can see, we are in it because of a really, and this is very important to

13:07her, right? So, it's not just growing it as fast as possible and then getting out. I mean, she's building this as a legacy for her.

Nathan Latka

13:13>> I love that. What were profits in 2025?

Rohit Garg

13:162025, we were at about EBITDA was about 24, '22, '23, or '24. So, we haven't really fully closed the books yet, but there was a free cash flow of about 1.5 last year.

Nathan Latka

13:29>> I just have to congratulate you both. You know, I interview thousands of founders, and it's just so refreshing to hear

13:36>> subject matter expertise, bootstrapped, playing the long game, profiting, you know, with scale over 10,000,000 of ARR. It's really impressive. My thought goes back to a theory I have on sort of the world, which is this idea that over the past ten years, most folks have made a lot of money in bits like you're doing. 24% EBITDA and 12,000,000 top line. You're printing money on bits. You built software. Right? Digital. I think with how AI is making

14:02>> bits sort of so easy to build, I think the next decade is gonna be ADAMS focused. And the ADAMS version, the ADAMS analog to what you're building would be you buying up the best performing dental practices and running them. However, then you're sort of competing with your own customers. How do you think about this sort of ADAMS strategy?

Rohit Garg

14:21I think the next step is to really understand and build a software that's outcome based rather than buying up dental practices. I don't think that's the right solution for some somebody like us. DSOs have done that and they have built, these organizations and they've actually many of them have actually folded and failed. I think the game should be about building an outcome based software, right, which you become you sell the full ecosystem of how to run

14:50a dental office, right? Includes all your all the software needs that you need and be able to sell that thing as a perhaps even as a percentage of their revenue, right? So, in that way, what you're saying kind of does make sense that you're owning a part of the dental office, but not in the traditional sense that you actually literally own the brick and mortar dental office.

Nathan Latka

15:11>> You look at McDonald's. McDonald's is really a real estate company with a very efficient McDonald's that sits on top of it. You know? A lot of these companies, you know, Sears, Macy's that were founded way back in the day are now trading off the book value of their real estate holdings underneath. And so I just wonder, I'm searching what's the modern day analog to those kinds of companies. And I think it's gonna be somebody like you

15:31>> and Aditi. May maybe you don't go buy the practices. But to your point, if you're helping drive all their revenue because of this great software you've built, you know, service as a software, you're pretty darn close to being an owner.

Revenue Ladder: $2M to $12.5M in Five Years

Rohit Garg

15:42You are. And at that point, as I said, you should think about selling the services more as percentage of the revenue than just the software, because it's not quite just the software. It's your whole full system process. And the whole process has been codified. And the speed at which you move with AI and becoming an AI native company to be able to drive build all the agents on top so that you're not interacting with the software

16:05like click here, click here, click here. You're actually having agents built that control, hey, keep my confirmation rate at this. I would like to have my supplies rate at this. Remind me about this. Not even use the UI anymore because the UI is no longer important. Right? Yep. Like, think about an office manager doesn't sit in front of their desk. They just roam around with a headset in their ear and say, hey, Nathan is here. Please

16:33check them in. Yep, Nathan is done. Send them the bill. So, that's kind of the next step of software that's coming up, which is really interacting with it like you would interact with another human.

Nathan Latka

16:45>> So, how many folks are full time at the company today, and how many of those are engineers thinking about agentic workflows for dental offices?

Rohit Garg

16:52So, we have about 80 people worldwide, and about 42, 43 of them are in The US, and the rest of them are in India. And engineering wise we have about eighteen seventeen eighteen developers and at least three or four of them are thinking about identity workflows, I personally spend a lot of time because I'm very technically involved myself spend a lot of time looking at agentic workflows and how do we make all our existing stack fully

17:20agentic as well.

Nathan Latka

17:22>> Are you seeing the dental assistants sitting in Oklahoma at a dental shop that does 1,000,000 a year when they're not checking somebody at the front? Do they have LevelBull up on the side trying to build their own version of practice by Numbers so they can cancel their account with you?

24% EBITDA and $1.5M Free Cash Flow in 2025

Rohit Garg

17:33Oh, they have. Many people have tried. Many people will try. Most dentists just want to come in, do the work, see their patients, go back home. Will there be more noise? Yeah, there'll be more noise. But the incumbents, especially like practicenumbers who are very nimble, meaning we're very nimble, we move fast, and we modify things pretty much quickly, will be completely fine.

17:57The future is brighter today than it was a year ago.

Nathan Latka

18:01>> What's the vision for the business? If I have you back on the show in ten years, you know, what's your product look like? What's your revenue look like? Are you still bootstrapped?

Rohit Garg

18:09Ten years from now, $100,000,000 plus revenue. That's absolutely possible. And that will happen. It'll probably happen much faster. There's a lot of initiatives in the works that obviously we can't talk about, but that will drive very significant growth and very significant retention. What we're really trying to get done is go from just selling software, but to sell outcomes to be able to sell that, hey, you'll get three more employees, two more employees that do the work

18:40for you, not just with everything that we're doing right now, but a lot of other things that we're working on that that's not even out yet. And that's that's what we're trying trying to get done is pretty much take over the all the process and the automation and the real repetition so that the office managers and the assistants and the hygienists and the doctors can pretty much work and deal with their patients and not have to

19:06worry about any of this process stuff, any of the software stuff, any of the documentation stuff.

Nathan Latka

19:10>> Last question I've got for you. I don't know, obviously, you know, every Bootstrap founder is always going to this motion of, okay. We're making good profits. We can pay ourselves dividends. Like, at some point, do we sell? Do we not sell? We have employees, obviously, to worry about. If somebody like Henry Schein, who owns Dentrix, comes to you and offers you guys a $180,000,000 all cash upfront today to sell the business, what is that general conversation

19:31>> between you and Aditi, your wife and cofounder? What's that conversation probably sound like?

Rohit Garg

19:35Well, it's gonna be it's gonna be a tough conversation because there's gonna be differing opinions,

19:42And we're going have to make that call with hopefully a consensus. And the question, the key question that we're going to try to answer is, have we done enough? Have we built what we wanted to build and are we done? And if we are, at that point, we take it. And if we are not, we don't take it.

Nathan Latka

20:01>> Yep. Yep. Rohit, I love that. Let's wrap up here. People want to follow more of your story and your wife's story, your co founder story online, where can they find you?

Rohit Garg

20:08Practicenumbers.com or LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

20:11>> Guys, practicenumbers.com. Doctor Ediddy launched her practice in 2010. Ro was a smart man, married her, or maybe they're married before, but they're they're now husband and wife. And this is a profitable bootstrapped company, which we love. In 2025, they finished with 12,500,000 of ARR. Alright, Rohit. Thank you so much for taking us to the top.

Rohit Garg

20:32Absolutely. It's a pleasure being here.