BIS Safety Software
👤 Dan MacDonald (Not a coder — a retail and training guy who out-patienced the market: 20 years, no VC, churn under 1% in a niche nobody wanted.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
A retail-furniture guy spent 20 years turning mandated safety training into a 99%-retention, no-VC SaaS.
Will it work? · our read
Un-leavable. Twenty years of patience in a niche nobody romanticizes. The moat is real — 99% stay — but it is labor-heavy and Canada-bound. A fortress, not a rocket.
01How the money moves
Law mandates safety training + records
→
BIS runs the LMS, records + course store
→
Annual per-seat SaaS + courses — 99% renew
02The numbers
$25M CAD
ARR (2025)
founder
<1%
annual logo churn
founder
2.5M+
users trained
founder
About $18M USD. Founder-disclosed on Practical Founders; aggregators lowball private bootstrappers. PF podcast
About $25M CAD ARR · 99% retention · zero VC.
🔒
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Practical Founders #178 — Dan MacDonald interview (ARR, 99% retention, story)BIS Safety Software — product site (model, 50%+ referral customers)BIS LMS + Network Partner course storeEntrepreneur UK — BIS on training + complianceDan MacDonald — LinkedIn
Revenue is founder-disclosed on the Practical Founders podcast (about $25M CAD, roughly $18M USD ARR, "approaching $20M ARR"; 200 staff; 2.5M+ users; 99% retention) — first-party but verbal, not an audited filing. Third-party aggregators lowball it (one shows $6.6M), implausible for 200 staff, so I trust the founder's figures. Founding year is approximate: "nearly 20 years" as of 2025 and Crunchbase's "18 years" point to roughly 2006-2007. "Customers helped fund early development" comes from the episode summary, so I anchored the key move on the well-documented retention/referral facts instead. I could not confirm a specific Inc 5000 / Deloitte Fast 50 listing; growth is documented via a 20-year track record and an in-progress staged exit, not an award. Competitor names (Cority, Intelex, KPA) are illustrative of the funded EHS field. No drama invented — this is a patience-and-retention win, not a clever trick. We never score you.