How Practice by Numbers Reached $16.5M ARR and 1,300 Customers Bootstrapped (Interview with CEO Rohit Garg)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

0:01Hey 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 us to the top?

Rohit Garg

0:15Yes, absolutely.

Origin Story: How Rohit Got Into Dentistry

Nathan Latka

0:17All right, how did you build the software? Were you running your own dental practice before this and got frustrated?

Rohit Garg

0:22You 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. like, oh, this dentistry is 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 is 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, seeing an empty need, like a niche that needs to be filled and it's a large, large opportunity.

1:01Okay, so just to be clear, Dr. Aditi is your wife and she opened her dental practice in 2010? okay. And ⁓ were you working in the dental office with her as well or you just hear stories back at home?

1:06That's right, yes. No, I would just hear stories. I was working for Philips Healthcare. I would just hear stories. Hey, what should I do here? What should I do there? I'm like, well, go look at the data. Go look at.

1:23What was she saying? Give me a sense of what some of the problems were that she was bringing to you.

Wife and Co-Founder Dr. Aditi's Dental Practice

Nathan Latka

1:26Well, she was trying to figure out, what's going on with treatment exceptions, 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 the 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 database, in the backend and try to figure out, give her answers.

Problems Dentists Face Without Good Data

Rohit Garg

2:04And so with that in mind, which of these solutions did you build first? I'm sharing your website right now.

2:10Yeah, so the numbers part was built first, right? So we went from practice by numbers, right? And that was her idea. we built it. So that's the business analytics at the top. ⁓ And the whole business analytics was built first, right? Business analytics, the practice IQ 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 dental space. So we built that on the dental space side. ⁓

2:18Which one is that here? Okay. What databases were you mining for data or what other tools in the space were you trying to connect with APIs and webhooks so that your wife could put together these dashboards?

2:48Yeah, so it's their PMS, 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 360-degree view of the practice to understand really what's going on, what decisions you should be making.

3:06And those management systems are like, are those your competitors today or are there other ones out there?

3:11No, the competitors are listed, but those are the systems we partner with. These are the systems we sit on top of, right? So in the case of healthcare, those are our competitors. In the case of healthcare, for example, you would sit on top of an Epic or e-clinical works. In the case of dentistry, we sit on top of Dentrix or Open Dental, like equivalent to what it would be for medicine.

First Product Built: Business Analytics

Nathan Latka

3:18these ones. Okay. 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 gonna accrue over time? Is it gonna be you, the aggregator of all the data? Or is it gonna be the specific, like, know, Dentrix that's gonna expand vertically?

3:50Yeah, 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 will get you from point A to point B. It doesn't have all the detailed depth analytics. If you're trying to really look for Cadillac of what you're trying to get done, you'd come to practice for numbers. If you just look at basic reporting, you would go to Dentrix. So that's why what we have is our customers are almost 2x of national average, right? In terms of the volume of the production that they do. And because they got the 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 analytic 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

Integrations with Practice Management Systems

Rohit Garg

4:24You mean the revenue they do?

Nathan Latka

4:44A PMS, right? A Dentrix or an OpenNedle. They would have an analytic system, maybe in the last 10 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 a 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 the box. Sit on top of the PMS and then give them everything. And that's what PBN has built out now. And now what PBN is doing from this point on with this 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 AI receptionist is gonna come out. what we, the speed at which we move, so the question for you that you asked is how come these Gentrix and OpenNet, because they just can't move at the speed at which we can move, because these are supply company, these are owned by. Henry Schein and Paterson, these are large supply companies. They don't have the technical skills or even the people to build software the way we can.

Why Incumbents Like Dentrix Cannot Compete

Nathan Latka

5:47I'm surprised, so one of the ways that I try and understand is someone truly the integrator of data in their space. So 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?

6:01So dentistry, even though it's quite fragmented, it is dominated by the five that we have listed. That's why we are focusing on to get the best bang for the buck, right? So you could list, you could go 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 70, 80,000 dental offices covered.

6:24I see. Okay. That makes sense. That's, that's what's driving the pro the prioritization of your integration engineering roadmap. Okay. And, and when I want to keep building on the backstory on launch in 2015, but just so we get a snapshot of today, what's the average dental practice paying you today?

6:40So at this point, we are reaching about 12, $13,000. And that's the average. And some, yes, per year. And some people reach almost all the way to like $17,000, $18,000.

6:47per year. So your largest customer would be about 18,000 a year.

6:58$19,000 a year, yeah.

7:01I'm surprised that the Delta of your largest customer relative to your average is so small because I would imagine you have dental practices on your platform. Some do half a million a year in revenue and some per location.

7:08This is the location. Yes, of course there are 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.

7:22Okay, 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?

7:31not quite our largest customer is about 250,000 because they don't have all the features, right? Because 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, $18,000, $19,000.

7:48Okay, that makes more sense to me, got it. Okay, so you're expanding based off number of locations. Is there a reason, I mean, do you have an upsell motion that's tied to jobs that you're actually doing for the dental offices? know, number of intake forms completed, number of new customers, number of phone calls resolved, things like that?

8:07No, 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 we 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.

8:32Yep. what is the, are you able, I mean, you sit, do you sit on the payment flows of the dental offices? Can you see which dental offices do the most revenue?

8:41We do, because we have the analytics, right? So we have all the numbers. We 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.

8:52Really, so if you had to sum up the entire ecosystem that you're supporting today, just your active customers, how many total, not locations, but total individual sort of customer logos are you working with? And does that equal a billion of year of total revenue, 100 million of total revenue, just the total summed amount?

9:07So, okay, so this is how you have to look at it. In terms of you're trying to find out what the payments revenue opportunity could be, looking at about $3 billion in our current, $3 to $4 billion in our current system.

9:21Say that again, you cut out. There's three to four billion flowing through your system right now and dental appointments being booked.

9:25Sorry, my monitor cut.

9:30I apologize, we're gonna have to reset this. I hope you can edit this out.

9:37We will edit this row it.

Rohit Garg

9:42I apologize. have one second. This is so freaking annoying.

9:42Can you hear me?

Pricing and Average ACV per Location

Nathan Latka

10:24I'm so sorry. I have a brand new Mac monitor and it crashes like every

10:24Is this better? No problem. Let's pick back up. I'll ask the question then we'll let you answer. So Rowan, 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

10:44So we just launched a payments product last year. So the GMB that we have is about $190 million. But what's possible in our system is close to about $2-ish billion of ⁓ additional or total GMB possible in our system at this point. And as the number of locations grow, that GMB opportunity also grows.

11:07How do you know the opportunity is two billion?

11:10because 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, so they come in as a check or an APH, right, because it doesn't, it's not quite gets run through the credit card terminal.

11:28Medicare, Medicaid. Yep. Are you installing the physical credit card terminals or do you use third party software, I mean hardware with your software installed?

Nathan Latka

11:42So 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 we work so we get a little bit of a spread in there. So it's quite profitable.

11:57Is that take rate under 2 %?

12:00⁓ It's I yes

12:05You hesitated.

12:07Well, you have to be, yes, yes. Average is under 2%. I hesitated because I wish you'd cut this out because Tennessee is very sensitive to that. Because once they know, they will negotiate much harder.

Rohit Garg

12:11on average it's under 2%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course, of course. But the, the, the 1.8 billion of GMV that you see on your system that you're not processing directly at, you're only processing 200 million, said, how are they currently processing it how do get them to switch over to you?

Nathan Latka

12:38It's an upsell motion. 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 not a pilot, right? They have whatever they have through Costco or through Bank of America and they're really 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 carton file, you can pick up BCI 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. And then change management in the small business is the hardest thing to do.

13:15And so how many, with that in mind, how many individual customers, not all locations, but the top, top level customers are you working with today?

13:23So the top level customers, have about 13 to 1,400 top level customers.

Rohit Garg

13:30Okay, and that represents what about 5,000, 6,000 locations?

13:33That represents about 2,000 locations and about 5,000 6,000 providers.

13:40So there can be multiple providers per location. What is a provider? Give me an example at a dental office.

13:42Yes. ⁓ Like a dentist, a periodontist, an orthodontist, you have multiple doctors in there.

Nathan Latka

13:53I see, okay, that makes sense to me. Interesting. Now, 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 15, 16 million ARR today, is that about right?

Payments Product and GMV Opportunity

Rohit Garg

14:06⁓ We will end the year at about 16 and a half.

Nathan Latka

14:13How does that make you guys feel? mean, that must feel amazing launching in 2015.

14:19It does. COVID kind of didn't help us, right? Because we were growing, growing 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 million at 2021, at the end of 2021. And now we're gonna end this year at about $16.5 million. So the growth has been pretty incredible from 2021, 2022 to 2026. And you actually see it accelerating as we go into next year.

14:46And your, so your target, we're recording here in April of 2026. Your target this year is to end at 16.5 million of ARR. Where did you end 2025 December ARR?

14:55about 12 and a half.

14:5712 and okay, so I just I feel like you guys are you're 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 12.5 million to 16.5 million feels like small growth? How can you grow faster?

Rohit Garg

15:12It is small growth. First of all, remember we are bootstrapped completely. there's not. Yes, 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 is a good profit. This will be, actually this year will be even a better profitable year. We're looking at, I don't know, 30 % perhaps of.

Nathan Latka

15:17Well, congrats. That's awesome.

15:3930 % plus EBITDA, right? And 35, 40 % growth. So we a rule of 70, 80 company. We are comfortable. We don't want to break anything. And 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 put fuel to the fire and grow faster. Will that be the right set of customers? Perhaps. ⁓ So the short answer is I don't know why we are growing at the rate which we are growing and why we shouldn't grow faster. We probably should, but that would mean a lot more fuel to the fire and a lot more risk. And there's no reason for us to take risk because we are growing at a very... profitable, very quick pace, people are happy, know, they're supported. If you look at 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 hump. And as you can see, we are in it because of Aditi and this is very important to her, right? So it's not just growing it as fast as possible and then getting out and she's building this as a legacy for her.

16:57love that. We're profits in 2025.

17:012025 we were at about EBITDA was about 24, 22, 23 or 24. We haven't really fully closed the books yet, but there was a free cashflow of about 1.5 last year.

Rohit Garg

17:14I just have to congratulate you both. I interview thousands of founders and it's just so refreshing to hear a company in a specific niche with subject matter expertise, bootstrapped, playing the long game, profiting with scale over 10 million 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 10 years, most folks have made a lot of money in bits like you're doing. 24 % EBITDA on 12 million top line, you're printing money on bits, you built software, right, digital. I think with how AI is making bits sort of so easy to build, I think the next decade is gonna be atoms focused. And the atoms version, the atoms 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 atoms strategy?

18:06Well, ⁓ meaning if you look at the article from Sequoia about service as software rather than software as a service, right? And that's kind of where you're going. I 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 somebody like us. DSOs have done that and they've built ⁓ these organizations and they've actually, many of them have actually folded and failed. I think what we would...

Nathan Latka

18:39Can you name, Rowett, can you maybe just name one or two of those, someone that's tried to roll up dental practices that started in software?

18:45⁓ I think, yeah, I don't want a name because I'm not exactly sure ⁓ and I don't want to go on the record because I don't want to get sued about... No, no, Yeah, none of these competitors are purely software competitors. I think the game should be about building an outcome-based software, right, which you sell the full ecosystem of...

Rohit Garg

18:53Okay. But are any of your competitors doing this that you list on your compare page or any of these guys rolling up? Okay.

Nathan Latka

19:15how to run a dental office, right? Includes 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.

19:38Yeah. I just think back to, know, the analogies, right? 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, know, Sears Macy's that were founded way back in the day are now trading off the book value of the 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 going to be somebody like you and it did. He may, maybe you don't go by the practices, but to your point, if you're helping drive all their revenue, because of this great software you've built, service as a software, you're pretty darn close to being an owner.

Rohit Garg

20:10You are and at that point, as I said, you should think about selling the services more as a 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 like click here, click here, click here. You're actually having agents built that basically 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? 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 check them in. 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, with another person, rather than with the software or user interface. User interfaces become less and less important actually.

21:22So how many folks are full time at the company today and how many those are engineers thinking about agentic workflows for dental offices?

21:29So we have about 80 people worldwide, and about 42, 43 of them are in the US, and the rest of them are in India. ⁓ engineering-wise, we have about... ⁓ 17, 18 developers and at least three or four of them are thinking about agentic workflows. The rest of them are still working on a lot of the voice payments and other stuff because that stuff doesn't go away. Meaning you still have to make sure your product is stable later on as well. But 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 agentic as well.

Customer Count, Locations, and Providers

Nathan Latka

22:10seeing the dental assistants sitting in Oklahoma at a dental shop that is a million a year when they're not checking somebody at the front, do they have level up on the side trying to build their own version of practice by numbers so they can cancel their account with you?

22:21They have many people have tried many people will try as they call it the sass apocalypse It's gonna it's gonna happen it happen in micro places But 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 but the incumbents especially like practice my numbers who are very nimble goes meaning we're very nimble we move fast and we Modify things pretty much quickly will be completely fine. The future is brighter today than it was a year ago.

22:57love that as we round out here the story I want to make sure your revenue growth accurate 2015 was launched when did you break your first million of revenue do you remember

23:05I think we broke the first million in 2018, so in about 14 months, I think we were at a million, and 2018 and 19 went well, and everybody knows then what happened in 2020.

23:18Sorry, when did you write the first line of code for the platform?

23:21Like mid to late 2015, so we did it, me and my co-founder, we have a third co-founder who's a CTO and Chris and I did it all by sweat equity because we were bored at our current jobs, we wrote it all ourselves.

Revenue History from 2015 to 2026

Rohit Garg

23:25Okay. So from 2015 to 2018, that's how long it took you to write the first line of code and scale to a million of revenue. Okay. And then 2021, you had to relaunch at about 2 million of ARR. Then you start growing after 2021. Do you remember what you finished like 2023 at?

23:41right here. 2023. I think we almost doubled it in that. I think we were close to fourish at that time, if I'm not mistaken. I have numbers.

23:59Okay. Okay, and then we know that 2025 you were at 12 million, so that means 2024 you probably ended what, somewhere around eight million? Yeah, yeah, yeah, very interesting. Okay, what's the vision for the business? If I have you back on the show in 10 years, what's your product look like? What's your revenue look like? Are you still bootstrapped?

Nathan Latka

24:09That's right, yes. Good question. I wish I had a crystal ball. Probably, I would say, 10 years from now, $100 million 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.

24:26Yeah.

Rohit Garg

24:50And that's what's going to drive the company valuation much, further as well, because 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 for you, not just with everything that we're doing right now, but a lot of other things that you're working on that that's not even out yet. And that's that's what we're trying to get done is pretty much take over the all the and the automation and the reputation 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 worry about any of this process stuff, any of the software stuff, any of the documentation stuff.

Team Size and Engineering Focus on AI

Nathan Latka

25:39Interesting. Interesting. Well, I love to you back on in 10 years. We'll obviously get an update. Last question I've got for you. I don't know. Obviously, you know, every bootstrap founder is always going through this motion of, okay, we're making good profits. We can pay our self dividends. Like at some point, do we sell? Do we not sell? have employees obviously to worry about if somebody like Henry shine who owns Dentrix comes to you and offers you guys $180 million all cash upfront today to sell the business. What is that conversation between you and a Diddy, your wife and co-founder? What's that conversation probably sound like?

Bootstrapped Profitability and Growth Philosophy

Nathan Latka

26:10Well, it's gonna be a tough conversation because there's gonna be differing opinions ⁓ and we're gonna have to make that call with hopefully a consensus. And the key question that we're gonna try to answer is, 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.

26:35Yeah, Rowett, I love that. Let's wrap up here. If people want to follow more of your story and your wife's story, your co-founder story online, where can they find you?

26:42Practice symbols.com or LinkedIn

Potential Acquisition Conversation

Rohit Garg

26:45Guys, practicenumbers.com. Dr. Aditi launched her practice in 2010. Ro was a smart man, married her, or maybe they were married before, but they're now husband and wife, and he's going, man, I'm listening to all of my wife's problems on running a dental office. By 2015, he launched practice by numbers to help her aggregate things like PMS, analytics, online bookings, form, intake, phone, payment POS, website, put it in one spot so she could increase the revenue of her dental practice. Fast forward to today, they're serving 1,300 customers. expanding 2000 dental locations and 5,000 providers. Their largest customer pays over $250,000 per year. Average ACV is about 13,000 per year per location, but they're expanding rapidly. They hit 2 million of revenue in 2021 when they had to relaunch because of COVID, broke 8 million in 2024, and now here in 2026 aiming for 16.5 million of ARR. And this is a profitable. bootstrapped company, which we love in 2025. They finished with 12.5 million of ARR and 22, 23 % EBITDA 80 folks full time 43 in the U S rest in India now building out a Gentic workflow to actually get jobs done for these dental practices. All right, Rohit, thank you so much for taking us to the top.

Nathan Latka

27:58Absolutely, it's pleasure being here.

10-Year Vision and $100M Revenue Goal

Rohit Garg

28:01All right,