#207: Former Teacher Built a Market-Leading School Hiring Marketplace - Wayne Cartmel · Practical Founders Podcast summary

Key takeaways

Distribution and execution are the most critical factors for SaaS and marketplace success. Building a product is the easy part; getting it adopted requires resilience and disciplined go-to-market efforts.
Start small with your target market to build proof, trust, and momentum before scaling. Wayne began with local schools, which proved the concept and created advocates.
Deliver value and build trust before charging. Wayne gave away his platform initially to demonstrate its worth, leading to a robust customer base that appreciated his service.
Focusing on your core market and maintaining high customer satisfaction builds a defensible market position. Wayne’s company holds roughly 45% market share through relentless focus and excellent service.
Bootstrapping enables control and alignment with your mission. Wayne avoided external funding and made strategic choices that reinforced his long-term vision.
Persistence through setbacks, such as COVID-19 disruptions and data loss, is crucial. Wayne's ability to adapt and maintain resilience has been key to his success.
Effective leadership involves balancing growth with company culture, relationships, and a clear sense of purpose. Wayne prioritizes quality, customer success, and personal well-being.

Summary

The Power of Distribution and Execution in SaaS Success

Wayne Cartmel emphasizes the critical importance of distribution, sales, and marketing over product development in building a successful SaaS or marketplace business. Despite advancements in AI that allow quick product creation, many entrepreneurs struggle with getting their product into the hands of customers. Wayne highlights that resilience and discipline to push through rejection are what separate successful founders from those who give up. The key message is that building the product is the 'easy' part; the real challenge lies in the go-to-market strategy.

Wayne's Entrepreneurial Journey and Building MyNewTerm

Wayne, a former math teacher from the UK, identified a pain point in the education sector—an outdated, manual application process for teacher jobs. Starting with a £5,000 innovation voucher and a volunteer CTO he met at university, he spent two years developing a digital applicant tracking system tailored for schools. Wayne bootstrapped the business, incurring significant personal debt, and initially gave away the software to demonstrate its value. Over time, his persistence paid off, and MyNewTerm established a dominant market position in England’s school hiring landscape, serving thousands of schools and trusts with substantial revenue and growth.

Market Challenges and Strategies for Scaling in Education Tech

Wayne discusses the difficulties in entering and scaling within the education sector, which was largely paper-based and skeptical of digital solutions when he started. Initial efforts involved piloting in a small geographic area and building trust through free usage. As COVID-19 hit, growth stalled temporarily, but Wayne pivoted by focusing on product development and expanding into multi-academy trusts. Key to his success was value-driven pricing, high customer retention, and maintaining control of the company without external funding. He highlights the importance of focusing on core offerings and the defensibility of a tough, hard-won marketplace.

Sustainable Growth, Market Leadership, and Company Culture

Wayne's strategy revolves around deep focus on his core market, maintaining high service quality, and deliberately avoiding the pitfalls of over-expansion or external funding that might compromise control and customer value. With around 45% market share in multi-academy trusts, he foresees continued growth through expanding adoption within the UK market. The company culture emphasizes resilience, close relationships with customers, and doing good work—values that Wayne believes will sustain the company long-term. He also advocates for work-life balance, enjoying activities like skiing and football refereeing to stay grounded.

Reflections on Entrepreneurship and Future Outlook

Wayne reflects on the long, challenging journey from concept to success, emphasizing that perseverance in execution and distribution is vital. He values the independence that comes from bootstrapping and controlling his destiny, rather than chasing external funding or rapid scale. Wayne envisions a long-term future where his company remains a dominant, ethical player in UK education, continuously improving and serving a vital societal mission. He stays focused on quality over size, and he sees his ongoing mission as making a real difference in schools and teachers' lives.

Show notes

Wayne Cartmel grew up on a small farm in the Lake District region of northwest England and was selling chickens by the age of four. He trained as a maths teacher in Bedfordshire and could not believe the process he had to go through to apply for jobs — hours of Word-based application forms, one after another. He asked why nobody had digitized it, and then decided to do it himself.

Funded by a £5,000 innovation voucher and built with a computer science volunteer who is still his CTO eleven years later, it took two years to reach a working prototype. Wayne took no funding, went over £100,000 into personal debt, and did not draw a livable salary for several years.

MyNewTerm is a specialized hiring marketplace and applicant tracking system that connects schools across England directly with job seekers. It allows educational employers to post vacancies and manage candidates using a streamlined workflow that supports part-time, full-time, and temporary roles.

MyNewTerm now partners with over 6,000 schools and 500 multi-academy trusts, has surpassed £5M in revenue, and processes over 100,000 candidate applications a month with just 20 employees. It holds roughly 45% market share among multi-academy trusts against a private-equity-backed incumbent.

Key Takeaways

Distribution Wins — Anyone can build a product now; almost nobody can get it into customers' hands.
Start Absurdly Small — He targeted five schools in one district of Luton, then moved to the next.
Free Buys Evidence — Schools wouldn't pay for an unproven marketplace, so he gave it away to prove it worked.
Focus Compounds — Sticking to the core, not chasing adjacent opportunities, is what built the market share.
Hard Equals Defensible — The marketplace was brutal to start, which is exactly why nobody can replicate it.

Quote from Wayne Cartmel, Founder and CEO of MyNewTerm

"Distribution and execution are everything, because the market nowadays is going to be flooded with software products, EdTech in particular. The advancements in AI mean that you can spin up products really quickly. I almost wish that was available ten years ago when I was starting as a non-technical founder.

"Building the product is the easy bit; I thought it would be the hard bit. What I failed to realize, and I wish somebody had told me, is that it's actually the distribution and the sales and marketing, the go-to-market motion, that's the really tough bit, doubly hard with a two-sided marketplace.

"You can build a product on such a small budget now, but you've got to be really deliberate and disciplined to keep on going and generate momentum. That's why many don't make it: they don't have the ability and resilience to get through the really hard moments when people are continually saying no to you, and you're continually being rejected."

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#207: Former Teacher Built a Market-Leading School Hiring Marketplace - Wayne Cartmel