About

I’m Mike Potter, co-founder and CEO of Rewind. Since 2015, James Ciesielski and I have built Rewind from zero to over $100 million in total revenue, we‘ve protected data for 150,000+ businesses across more than 100 countries. We’re a team of 100+ people generating over $20 million annually, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada.

I’m writing this to share what I’ve learned building a SaaS startup from nothing. Not theory - what actually worked and what nearly broke us. If you’re a Canadian founder building a SaaS company, these principles might help you avoid some of my mistakes.

Relationships Are Everything

In 2012, I left Adobe to start my first company, AddIn Social. For over a year, we had no meaningful income. The stress nearly ended my marriage. When we sold the company in 2013 for just enough for investors to get their money back I learned the most important lesson of my career: nothing is worth ruining your marriage over.

When James and I started Rewind in 2015, I was 39 with three kids. I couldn’t afford another year of zero income and maximum stress. We bootstrapped carefully. We didn’t bet the family’s stability on unproven ideas.

The business worked. But more importantly, my relationship with James grew stronger. My executive team became close friends. These relationships are what make Rewind meaningful. Revenue is great. The relationships are better.

Bootstrap to $1 Million

You should reach $1 million in annual revenue before raising significant investment. Bootstrapping doesn’t just preserve equity - it forces you to build something customers actually want to pay for.

Our first three years: $30,000, $300,000, $1.2 million. That’s 40x growth in two years without venture capital. Every dollar mattered. Every customer conversation mattered. We couldn’t hide behind investor money or pivot our way out of problems.

If you can’t get to $1 million in revenue, raising $5 million won’t save you. Figure out product-market fit first. Then scale.

Talk to Your Customers

The idea for Rewind came from reading Shopify forums in early 2015. Store owners kept asking how to backup their data. Some had accidentally deleted blog posts. Others lost entire stores.

I knew about data loss firsthand. Years earlier at Adobe, my computer died mid-presentation in front of hundreds of people and my boss. Everything was gone. Cloud platforms have disaster recovery backups, but those don’t protect individual accounts from user mistakes. Most store owners didn’t know this.

Within hours of launching our first prototype in June 2015, store owners were signing up. A few months later, Les Sharma contacted us in a panic - an app had deleted all his products weeks before Christmas. We dropped everything and restored his data. That was our make-or-break moment.

Since then, we’ve had thousands of those moments. Every single one came from understanding what customers actually needed, not what we thought they needed.

Get Out of the Business

I operate at two levels. I can get deep in the business - debugging issues, reviewing code, analyzing data. But I can also step back and work on the business - strategy, hiring, long-term planning.

Most founders get stuck in one mode. You need both.

Getting away from the business matters more than most founders realize. Some of my best decisions came during time away walking my dogs, building LEGOs with my kids, just having space to process. You make better decisions with a clear head.

Hire Great People, Then Get Out of Their Way

Around 20 people, things start breaking. Communication gets harder. You can’t be involved in every decision anymore. You need people who can operate independently.

The right people don’t need micromanagement. They need context, resources, and trust. Give them that, and get out of their way.

Location Matters, But Not How You Think

We built Rewind in Ottawa. About half our team is now elsewhere in Canada, but we started here and I love it.

You can build world-changing applications in Silicon Valley. Cutting-edge AI companies. Those probably can’t be built in Ottawa. But you can build a successful company from anywhere. Location matters for what you want to build. Don’t move to San Francisco because that’s what founders are “supposed” to do.

What Keeps Me Up at Night

In year one, I worried about growing revenue. At $20 million annually, I still worry about growing revenue. The scale is different. The challenge is the same.

What’s hard now that wasn’t hard at $1 million? Getting everyone rowing in the same direction. Inter-company communication is really difficult with 100+ people.

The problems at $20 million are just as hard as the problems at $200,000 - they’re just different problems. If you’re looking for the moment when it gets easy, I haven’t found it yet.

But I have found something better: a team I genuinely love working with, customers whose businesses we protect every day, and a company culture that values people.

Rewind has given me more than money. It’s given me some of the best relationships I could have imagined. That’s what I want for you. Not just a successful company, but the joy that comes from building something meaningful with people you care about.

If my experience can help you get there faster, that’s why I’m writing this.