The SaaS Academy Revenue (2024)

Dan Martell is the founder and CEO of The SaaS Academy. His entrepreneurial history spans more than two decades and includes multiple failures before his first meaningful exit.

Martell failed his first company at age 17 and a second at 19. He then spent roughly three to four years consulting and writing code before reading his first business book at age 24. That book, The E-Myth, led him to hire a coach named Bob, a certified E-Myth coach based in Toronto, whose mentorship Martell credits with enabling his first successful venture, Spheric Technologies. During the Spheric years, Martell worked approximately 100 hours per week and traveled 250 days per year, managing 30 direct reports. He became a millionaire at 27. He has described that period as one in which transactional management, telling people what to do and checking that it was done, broke down at roughly 11 to 12 people and approximately $1.5 million in ARR.

In 2017, Martell was invited to spend a week in Switzerland with Richard Branson, whom he describes as running a portfolio of approximately 400 companies under the Virgin Group umbrella. Also present at that gathering was Brian, identified by Martell as the founder who had sold Braintree for approximately $650 million, as well as Tim Ferriss. Martell has said that observing how Branson protected his time through his executive assistant Helen, who conducted a 90-minute morning briefing each day, was a formative influence on the frameworks he now teaches. As of early 2023, Martell takes three-day quarterly retreats with his wife, which he presents as evidence that founders can protect personal time while continuing to grow a business. His book Buy Back Your Time was published ahead of the March 2023 session.