SaaS Scaling Secrets Unlocked

🔥 This SaaS Dads episode literally starts with a fire.
When Justin Silverman joins Gary to record the episode, there’s an actual fire burning roughly half a mile from his house.
During the conversation, evacuation warnings start appearing on his phone.
But while monitoring what’s happening outside, Justin shares the story of what he’s been building inside Merchynt.
Justin started Merchynt in 2019 as a side hustle.
That meant nights.
Weekends.
Early mornings.
And building around the full-time job that was still paying the bills.
He eventually focused heavily on agency partnerships because he couldn’t spend normal business hours selling directly.
Then AI arrived.
Justin realized that if he didn’t rebuild the service from an AI-first perspective, somebody else would.
That eventually led to Paige.
Around the same period, his life changed again.
His first son arrived.
Justin went full-time into Merchynt.
And Paige launched.
By the time we recorded this conversation, Justin said Merchynt was managing around 15,000 Google Business Profiles.
But this episode isn’t just about growth.
We talk about:
👉 Building a side hustle while working full-time
👉 Becoming a full-time founder
👉 Building around agency partnerships
👉 AI and the evolution of Merchynt
👉 Raising two young kids while running the business
👉 Working long hours and trying to find family balance
👉 Why Saturdays are now a no-work day with his son
👉 Learning to hire better people
👉 Giving up control without losing the vision
👉 Why Justin still takes unhappy customer messages personally
👉 Building a team that can solve problems without everything coming back to the founder
👉 Why putting yourself out there matters — even when you’re an introvert
And Justin leaves SaaS founders with a simple message:
You don’t need to create the next Facebook.
If you think you can do something better…
Do it better.
No more excuses.
Connect with Justin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/just1nsilverman/
Merchynt:https://www.merchynt.com/
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What do you do when the income you were relying on suddenly disappears?
In this episode of SaaS Dads, Gary sits down with Jonah Cockshaw from myGHLcoach.
On July 2nd, 2025, Jonah learned that his role at Extendly was no longer needed as part of a company restructuring.
The timing couldn’t have been much more difficult.
Jonah and his now-wife had recently finished renovating their home, paid the deposit for their wedding, had a one-year-old son, and had decided that his income would support the family while his wife stayed home with their child.
Then that income disappeared.
Jonah shares exactly what happened next.
Rather than immediately jumping into another full-time job, he gave himself a short window to see if he could generate enough income to cover the family’s bills.
His first move wasn’t building an offer, choosing an ICP or creating the perfect agency.
He reached out to people and companies in the HighLevel ecosystem and offered to help however he could.
That meant taking flexible contracting work for between $20 and $40 an hour and working as many paid hours as possible.
For several months, that meant 10, 12 and sometimes 14-hour days.
But at the same time, Jonah was also:
👉 Answering questions inside HighLevel communities
👉 Commenting on posts
👉 Recording helpful videos
👉 Jumping onto Zoom calls to help people
👉 Building visibility around his HighLevel knowledge
👉 Growing HighLevel affiliate income
When his affiliate dashboard reached around $900, Jonah realized that money effectively bought back roughly 45 hours of his own time the following month.
That became an important turning point.
He started saying no to some lower-paid contracting work and investing that time into building his own community, creating resources and running daily group coaching calls.
The first daily call happened on November 6th, 2025 — and Jonah says they’ve continued running calls Monday through Friday since then.
In this conversation, Gary and Jonah discuss:
👉 Losing his job while supporting a young family
👉 Nearly having to cancel his wedding
👉 Working 10–14 hour days to keep the bills paid
👉 The pressure that put on family life
👉 How he transitioned away from hourly contracting
👉 Using HighLevel affiliate income to buy back his own time
👉 Building a private community that was approaching 600 members at the time of recording
👉 Why he chose to put himself out there constantly instead of waiting for people to discover him
👉 Why Jonah doesn’t use AI to create his personal social media content
👉 The importance of authentic, human content
👉 Building daily coaching calls into his business
👉 Growing a team of seven, including Jonah
👉 Removing himself from much of the day-to-day client fulfillment
👉 How the business reached around $20K–$25K per month for the few months leading up to the interview
👉 Why approximately $5K of that was coming from HighLevel affiliate income
👉 Getting more time back with his wife and son
👉 His advice for anyone trying to establish themselves in a competitive market
One of Jonah’s biggest lessons from the journey:
“You first need to know your thing, but then other people need to know that you know the thing.”
Knowing your craft isn’t enough if nobody knows who you are.
You still have to put yourself out there.
 
Connect with Jonah:
myGHLcoach: ⁠https://myghlcoach.com/⁠
Subscribe to Jonah: ⁠https://jonah.openinapp.co/subscribe⁠
HighLevel Checklist: ⁠https://succeedwithhighlevel.com/checklist⁠
 
🔥 Jonah will also be attending and speaking at Level Up in Dallas.
 
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In this episode of SaaS Dads, Gary sits down with Adam McInnes from GHL Mastery.
Adam has been using HighLevel for years and explains that GHL Mastery grew out of the kind of program he wishes had existed when he first started learning the platform.
But this conversation isn’t only about HighLevel.
Adam talks openly about building his business while raising two young children, losing his job during COVID, working late into the night, going to counselling, and eventually realising that the business he was building for his family could not come at the expense of his family.
Today, Adam says he doesn’t work weekends, usually finishes work around 3:00–3:30, and deliberately separates his office from his home life.
Gary and Adam discuss:
👉 Starting a business while raising two young children
👉 Losing his job during COVID and deciding to build the business full time
👉 Working until 2:00–4:00 in the morning during the early stages
👉 Why Adam went to counselling while trying to balance business and fatherhood
👉 The conversation with his wife that made him rethink how he was working
👉 Why he stopped working weekends
👉 Building a team so he could remove himself from parts of the business
👉 How GHL Mastery developed
👉 The estimator tools that originally connected Gary and Adam
👉 Why Adam moved away from relying purely on the $297/month SaaS model
👉 Turning HighLevel solutions into higher-ticket consulting offers
👉 Why Adam focuses on quantifying the customer’s problem
👉 Asking businesses about leads, appointments, conversion rates and average customer value
👉 Why showing the financial size of a problem changes a sales conversation
👉 Adam’s AOF — Automated Operations Framework
👉 Using a paid roadmap as part of qualifying potential clients
👉 Why Adam says you have to stop caring whether somebody buys
👉 Why more conversations matter when selling
👉 The danger of endlessly building without speaking to potential customers
👉 Why Adam recommends talking to people in a niche before building the solution
👉 His advice to SaaS dads and mums going through the difficult early stages of business
One of Adam’s biggest lessons from the conversation:
The grind may be part of building the business.
But don’t sacrifice your family for it.
And if you need help whether that’s business help or mental health support go and get help.
 
🎥 Watch the full SaaS Dads conversation with Gary Capps and Adam McInnes.
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
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👉 Connect with Adam McInnes:
⁠GHL Mastery⁠
⁠HighLevel Asset Vault⁠
⁠AOF Playbook⁠

SaaS Dads is back with Dakota Routh, 4X SaaSPRENEUR Award Winner, the man behind Agency Support for HighLevel, and CEO of White Label Suite.
But this episode starts somewhere very different from SaaS.
In 2015, Dakota experienced a serious medical emergency after years of stomach problems.
His gallbladder had ruptured, he later developed sepsis, and during the ordeal his heart stopped twice.
His wife and children were there for part of that experience, and Dakota shares what it was like waking up after a medically induced coma and eventually realizing what his family had been through.
That experience changed the way he looked at his life, his family and his businesses.
Dakota and Gary talk about:
👉 Dying twice and waking up after five days in a medically induced coma
👉 The impact the experience had on his wife and children
👉 Going through depression and rebuilding his strength after leaving hospital
👉 Why family now comes first in the decisions Dakota makes
👉 Choosing experiences with his family over possessions
👉 Building businesses that give him the freedom to spend more time with them
👉 Bootstrapping his businesses rather than relying on outside funding
👉 How Agency Support for HighLevel started with Dakota, his wife and two VAs
👉 Building a team that eventually allowed him to step away from the day-to-day
👉 Why Dakota believes people need to treat a HighLevel business like a real business
👉 The three challenges he regularly sees people face when trying to build with HighLevel
👉 Why trying to do sales, marketing, operations and technical work yourself can hold you back
👉 Why Dakota says you should know whether something can be done not necessarily how to build it yourself
👉 Managing ongoing kidney disease after losing one kidney
👉 The importance of health, exercise and taking care of yourself while building a business
👉 Finding something bigger than yourself that keeps you moving when things get difficult
 
Dakota’s message toward the end of the conversation is simple:
Things are going to get difficult.
 
The question is whether you have something important enough to keep you moving forward when they do.
 
Connect with Dakota Routh:
Free GHL Resources: ⁠https://agencyownersupport.com/free-agency-resources⁠
 
Agency Support for HighLevel: ⁠https://agencyownersupport.com/⁠
GHL Playbook: ⁠https://ghlplaybook.com/⁠
⁠LinkedIn⁠
⁠YouTube⁠
⁠Instagram⁠
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
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Explore more:
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Gary introduces Chase as one of HighLevel’s most senior people, and for good reason, Chase has been with HighLevel for almost seven years and has held multiple roles across customer success, content and education, sales and marketing, and product marketing.
In this episode, Gary and Chase go back through that journey. Chase talks about starting out as a high school English teacher, moving into digital marketing, building an agency that ultimately failed, finding the right business partner, growing a seven-figure agency, and then discovering HighLevel at a time when the company was still in its early days. He also shares the family side of that journey.
Chase is a dad of three boys, and he talks about what he learned from becoming a father, how his experience as a teacher influenced the way he parents, and how family life developed alongside the growth of his career.
Gary and Chase discuss:
👉 Being a dad of three boys
👉 What Chase learned from teaching and how it carried into parenting
👉 His first agency failing around the time his first son was born
👉 Finding the right business partner
👉 The relationship between salespeople and operators
👉 Growing a seven-figure agency
👉 Why operators need to recognise when sales is not their strength
👉 The event that eventually led Chase to discover HighLevel
👉 Joining HighLevel during its early days
👉 The different leadership roles Chase has held inside HighLevel
👉 Watching HighLevel grow from a small startup to more than 2,000 employees
👉 The “skateboard” approach to product development
👉 Why HighLevel focuses on getting products into the hands of users quickly and learning from feedback
👉 Leadership, humility and dealing with criticism
👉 How AI is changing HighLevel
👉 Ask AI, managed agents and where Chase sees the next era of HighLevel developing
👉 Why AI is moving too quickly to predict too far ahead
👉 What Chase says people can expect to hear more about at Level Up
 
Chase also explains how being around the right people, attending events and meeting other agency owners played a major role in the path that eventually brought him into HighLevel.
This is a conversation with someone who has seen HighLevel from its early startup days through to where it is now, while also building a family and navigating multiple stages of business along the way.
 
🎙️ Featuring Gary Capps and Chase Buckner
 
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Season 3 of SaaS Dads starts with Bryce DeCora from CloseBot returning to the podcast with Gary Capps.
Bryce was Gary’s first guest when SaaS Dads originally launched, and in this episode they revisit the conversation that helped inspire the podcast in the first place, what it is really like balancing life as a SaaS founder, a dad, and someone trying to keep building a business in a fast-changing market.
Gary and Bryce talk openly about family, business, AI, customer support, SaaS growth, product focus and how much the software landscape has changed since their first conversation.
 
In this episode, they discuss:
 
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Bryce becoming a dad of three and balancing family life
 
🌳 Staying flexible while managing business and family
 
💻 The realities of running and growing a SaaS company
 
📉 Growth plateaus and the changing software market
 
🤖 How rapidly AI has changed over the past year
 
🛠️ Vibe coding and people choosing to build their own software
 
🎯 Why CloseBot continues to stay focused on conversational AI
 
📊 How data and analytics are being used inside CloseBot
 
💬 The challenges of customer support and customer expectations
 
❌ Why Bryce tries to understand why customers cancel
 
🧠 Product focus and why every new feature can create additional cost and complexity
 
Bryce also shares what CloseBot is working toward next, including more research around conversational AI, analytics, its MCP and further development around how AI can use data to improve sales agents.
 
Gary and Bryce also discuss the bigger question facing SaaS founders today:
How do you continue building when AI, software and customer expectations are changing this quickly?
Welcome back to SaaS Dads Season 3.
 
🎙️ Featuring Gary Capps & Bryce DeCora
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
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⁠⁠Community⁠⁠
🔗 Explore more:
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Most people pick a lane.
Molly Mahoney picked several and somehow made them all work.
Professional musical theater performer. National tour of Chitty Bang Bang. Knitting and crocheting business. Camera confidence coach. Messenger bot expert. AI educator. Broadway producer.
Oh, and mum to two boys aged 12 and 14 who between them have sold $1 drawings on Facebook Live, presented at business events in their backyard, and done a live stream with a SamCart co-founder to build a sales page at age 11.
This is one of those conversations that goes everywhere and somehow ties together perfectly at the end.
 
In this episode Molly gets beautifully honest about:
 
👉 Touring the world in a flying car and how that led to everything that came after
 
👉 Starting a business while baby-wearing and teaching dance classes with a baby on her back
 
👉 Her 12-year-old son who is basically an 80-year-old man in a child's body who hates AI
 
👉 Why she didn't let her kids play Fortnite and what they found instead
 
👉 The affiliate competition she nearly won and the Tesla she lost because of what she kept saying out loud
 
👉 Her son asking to come on a business trip to Gay Hendricks' house and why she said yes
 
👉 The sparkly boulder moment when everything in her business fell apart at once
 
👉 Losing her mum, tearing the cartilage in her wrist and her dog dying on her husband's birthday all at the same time
 
👉 How she got from Broadway opening night to a Tony Robbins stage in less than 12 hours
 
👉 Why frameworks equal freedom and what that means for SaaS mums everywhere
 
👉 The tickle points that most people completely miss when building their brand
 
👉 Why the humans behind the brand matter more than ever in an AI world
 
This one is warm, funny, sparkly and genuinely moving all at the same time.
 
Molly is proof that the weirdest path forward is usually the right one. And that staying calm through the chaos is the actual superpower that makes everything else possible.
 
🙏 🎧 You need this one today.
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
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Connect with Molly:
🔗 ⁠⁠https://mollymahoney.com⁠⁠
🔗 Free Gift: ⁠⁠https://molly.live/saasdads⁠⁠
🔗⁠⁠ https://aiify.me/content-club⁠⁠
🔗 ⁠⁠https://thepreparedperformer.com/⁠⁠
🔗 Instagram & Facebook: ⁠⁠@MollyMahoney

Two SaaS dads walk into a conversation about AI, kids, school, personal brand and the future.
 
Neither of them has any answers.
 
And somehow that's the most valuable episode we've done all season.
 
Danny Clarke is back for Season 2. Fresh from Costa Rica where they were both speaking at an event. Three kids aged 14, 12 and 10. A business he's built around finishing work at 2PM so he never misses a moment with his son on the football pitch.
 
And a head full of questions about what the hell any of us are supposed to tell our kids about their future.
 
Because here's the thing nobody's saying out loud.
 
We don't know what jobs will exist. We don't know what skills will matter. We don't know if school is preparing them for anything useful. And we don't know what the world looks like in five years let alone when these kids are grown up and trying to figure out their lives.
 
But we do know one thing.
 
The creators win. The consumers lose. And right now there's never been a bigger gap between the people using AI and the people who have no idea what's even possible.
 
In this episode Gary and Danny get completely honest about:
 
👉 Why Danny cut his workday to finish at 2PM and what that cost him and gave him
 
👉 The moment they both realised their kids are becoming independent faster than expected
 
👉 What the hell do you tell your kids to do when you can't even predict your own industry
 
👉 Why Danny's 14-year-old daughter is already questioning the point of school
 
👉 The shift from using AI to working with AI and why it's actually creating more work right now
 
👉 Why personal brand is more important than ever and what that really means
 
👉 The Tom the Sparky theory and the massive opportunity nobody is talking about
 
👉 Why imperfect action beats perfect knowledge every single time
 
👉 The 250 testimonials story that perfectly explains how goodwill actually works
 
👉 A frozen dragon in Antarctica and why Gary's wife goes down too many rabbit holes 😂
 
This one is raw, real and genuinely funny in parts.
 
Two dads. Two businesses. Zero certainty about the future. Loads of honest conversation about what it all means. 🙏
 
🎧 This is the conversation you didn't know you needed today.
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
🔗 Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mycrmsim
 
🔗 ⁠myCRMSIM Community⁠
 
🔗 Explore more:Get myCRMSIM — unlimited text messaging without the need for A2P.
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Connect with Danny:
 
🔗⁠ https://hellofreedom.co⁠
 
🔗 Facebook: Danny Clarke
 
🔗 ⁠https://myfunnelsystem.com/⁠
 
🔗⁠ https://mycontentsystem.com/⁠
 
🔗 ⁠https://aitwinstudio.co/

Most people dream about quitting their corporate job. Kunal actually did it.
Senior software engineer at Amazon. Stable salary. Everything covered every month, and he walked away to build something with his wife Ruheene that most people told him was a risk not worth taking.
His dad was the only one who said go, and now they're building Brandpod together, multiple SaaS products, a team, clients, and two kids aged eight and eleven who are already getting involved in the business in their own ways.
But here's what made this conversation different, it wasn't really about the business at all, it was about what it actually looks like to build something alongside the person you love, raise kids in a country far from your family, figure out screen time and Roblox and AI and what the future even looks like for children growing up right now.
 
Raw, honest and surprisingly funny. 😅
 
In this episode Kunal gets refreshingly real about:
 
👉 Quitting Amazon to build full time with his wife and what his dad said that surprised everyone
👉 Growing up in India, moving to Australia then the US and meeting Raheen on a dating website
👉 Getting married twice in two months because her mum was given three months to live
👉 What it's really like running multiple businesses with your life partner every single day
👉 His daughter pulling people into their booth at the HighLevel Dallas summit from age eight
👉 His son becoming their unofficial in house software tester for Brand Pod
👉 The Roblox warning every parent needs to hear right now
👉 Why he thinks critical thinking and resilience are the only skills that will matter for kids in an AI world
👉 The one thing he and Raheen do every Wednesday that keeps everything in balance
👉 His honest advice for any SaaS dad working alongside their partner
 
This one is warm, grounded and full of the kind of real talk you don't always hear from people building businesses in this space. 🙏
 
🎧 This one's for the dads and mums building something together.
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community:
🔗 ⁠Facebook group⁠
🔗 ⁠myCRMSIM Community⁠
 
🔗 Explore more:
Get myCRMSIM Unlimited text messaging without the need for A2P.👉 https://mycrmsim.com/
 
Get Your Free Trial of HighLevel and see why the top marketers swear by it:
👉 https://mycrmsim.com/get-high-level
 
Connect with Kunal:
🔗 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/asskaban⁠
🔗 Brand Pod: ⁠https://brandif.ai/⁠
🔗 ⁠https://heylevi.ai/

Most people have one rock bottom moment.
Russ Ward had several.
Got his girlfriend pregnant on the first date. Flew to Las Vegas and got married weeks later. Got kicked out of three colleges. Joined the Navy at 21 just to force himself into a job he couldn't quit.
Then built a bootleg DVD empire from his basement that made him $2-3 million over 10 years.
Then the FBI raided his house.
The NFL sued him for $10 million. The IRS hit him with a $119,000 tax lien. His merchant accounts froze. His marriage fell apart. His kids went to live with their mum.
And he spent a week lying on the floor with a gun to his head.
He got up.
And now he's a two-time consecutive Gold SaaSpreneur. Standing on stage in a gold sparkly jacket collecting awards he spent six years working toward.
This is one of the most honest conversations we've ever had on SaaS Dads.
In this episode Russ gets completely raw about:
👉 Getting his girlfriend pregnant on the first date and flying to Las Vegas to get married
👉 Running nuclear reactors in the Navy until they found out he was colour blind
👉 Building a $2-3 million bootleg DVD empire from his basement while in the military
👉 The FBI raid, the $10 million NFL lawsuit and the IRS tax lien that froze everything
👉 Spending a week on the floor with a gun to his head and what pulled him back
👉 Writing letters to his kids apologising for being a bad dad and how that rebuilt everything
👉 Using a Cameo shout-out from Xzibit to break the ice with his estranged son
👉 How he went from bankrupt and unemployable to two-time Gold SaaSpreneur
👉 His 14-year-old daughter building an AI music business at farmers markets
👉 Why it took him six years to get his first Gold award and what he'd tell anyone still grinding
👉 The one piece of advice he gives to anyone hitting rock bottom right now
This one is unlike anything we've shared before.
Russ didn't just hit rock bottom. He built his rock bottom himself, brick by brick, bad decision by bad decision. And then he climbed out of it anyway.
If you're in a tough spot right now, this episode is for you. 🙏
🎧 Watch this one. Then watch it again.
 
👉 This is where it starts. Join our community
 
🔗 Facebook group
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Connect with Russ:
🔗 https://qualifiedlivetransfers.com/
🔗 https://www.facebook.com/TheLeadKing
🔗 https://theleadking.com/