"It Was Working Out All Along"

Making It Stories: One dreamer builds his own successful SaaS company after being told he "just wasn't cut out for product management."

My first failed teenage dream venture was with my younger brother, Parley, and it wasn’t his fault. I squandered my portion of the funds needed to build a legitimate clubhouse of our own, even after months of planning, designing it, creating blueprints, and estimating materials at Ace Hardware.

I hope I apologized at the time, but just in case, I tried to make it right in the dedication of Dear Fellow Spender:

The story is explained in my book, so I won’t belabor it here. And this article is not about me, or about adolescent dreams. Well, it is a bit about the latter, since what Par grew up to build has a lot to do with buildings and blueprints and bringing structures to life that are way bigger than our proposed clubhouse.

Parley Burnett is the Founder and CEO of the software company, Guardian. It’s built around the add-on he envisioned for Revit, a widely-used architectural design software, and has grown into a thriving 15-person company doing cool things. And even if I wasn’t his sister, I’d still be thrilled to share his founding story with my fellow dreamers. Especially now, while the early days of risking, hoping, and defying the odds and naysayers are fresh in his memory.

Meet your fellow dreamer, Parley Burnett:

In a recent conversation, Parley and I were chatting about life and his business. 

A man will be proud of something he’s built, but can still be overwhelmed at times. As we talked about the pressures, I asked if he would ever take a cush salary to go back to a less challenging 9-to-5 job. He answered with a quick and confident, “No. No, I wouldn’t.”

Heading to the airport for a recent business flight. The bagel on the suitcase cracks me up—dreamer life on the go!

“Why not?” I asked. “If you had to put it in three statements, why wouldn’t you go back to working for someone else?”

The reasons came quickly:

1. “There are no politics here.” He enjoys that he gets to create the work environment he’s wanted, and has full influence to not perpetuate what he saw go wrong at other companies. He appreciates the personal growth that comes along with this responsibility.

2. “The flexibility is unbeatable.” His teenage son often comes to his office after school to do homework, he can easily attend his daughters’ ballet classes, or cover at home for his wife, his partner in all of this dreaming. But he appreciates this for more than just himself. It’s something he values his entire team enjoying. And not in the way I’ve seen at other companies—where there’s a sterile HR policy of getting even brief absences cleared by the adult with authority over you. At Guardian, it’s more of a personal, collaborative thing. They want to share their absences with the others out of respect for each other and so nothing gets dropped. 

3. “The economics of it—we are creating the future we want.” Powerful. There’s a big difference between this and working to fund an existence.

“But what about passion?” you might be asking. Don’t you worry. Passion for solving a particular problem very much had a seat at the founding of this endeavor. That passion has just evolved as his dream has grown into a big reality. He describes himself as “kind of an introvert” and says what he’s needed to become passionate about is becoming the leader the business needs. Any challenge in that has been totally worth it, since that’s where all the personal growth is.

It’s almost like the thing we’re meant to be passionate about is creating a meaningful life, and stretching to realize our potential is how we do that. Being passionate about a craft or product or business is wonderful, but it’s only part of the life you’re making and the person you’re becoming.

The pivotal job

After his college graduation, Parley took a job working for a company that was great—at first. Our parents visited the office and began talking with a middle-age guy watering the office plants. When they asked him what his role was, Gary said, “My job is to get out of the way.” Turns out in addition to being the plant-waterer, he was also the president. That’s the kind of humble leader who can create an environment for employees to thrive. And thrive they did. According to Parley, “We were free to innovate, sell our ideas, and benefit from the fruits. It was really a dream situation.”

Parley’s cubicle at the good job. Circa 2017. Remember when we used to have paper on our desks?

But four years into Parley’s tenure, they brought in new “Silicon Valley leadership.” This leadership team included a CEO who was going to do amazing things. Translation: the founding investors wanted to grow it fast so they could sell it. Everything became political, decided by committee, and went against the grain of an industry that appreciates organic growth. One hot-shot leader in particular said all the right things to leadership, but treated employees in all the wrong ways. He saw traits such as honesty and humility as weaknesses, and told Parley, “You just aren’t cut out for product management.”  Never mind that Parley was well-liked and respected by the customers he oversaw and did his job extremely well.

This reminds me of the investor who told Jamie Kern Lima, the founder of IT Cosmetics, that “I just don’t think that women will buy makeup from someone that looks like you with your body and your weight.” Jamie sold the company six years later for $1.2 billion.¹ The takeaway? People can be dead wrong in their assessments of you.

After several miserable months under this guy, Parley was let go, one of the first of multiple people to be laid-off. It was one of the best things to happen to him in the long run but terrifying in the short run. Jobs are only safe until the day they’re not, and this “safe” job let him go just after he and his wife found out they were expecting a miracle baby girl, their second child. 

At one point in a follow-up conversation about this article, I made the observation that the bad job seemed to actually be really important for his growth.

"Oh, for sure,” he said. “That was my education right there. I saw how this can be done, and maybe how I'd like to do it differently if I ever had the chance."

Side note: He remains a little perplexed that like-minded individuals in the industry didn’t see the same opportunity to launch their own things but is grateful that, for whatever reason, he did.  Especially given the nature of architecture, he muses that it’s ironic that not everyone is creating their own thing. As he thinks back on conversations with architectural peers over the years, he wants to say to them, "Wait, aren’t we all creators here?"

Hindsight is amazing. At the time, Parley couldn’t see that the bad job, including all the dysfunction at the end, was actually preparing him for building his own software business. Could it be that whatever you’re struggling with right now—in your job, or even in your own business—is exactly the preparation you need for your own big thing or the shove to get on your own path? Could it be that you are indeed seeing opportunities not everyone sees?

To get another job, freelance, or to create?

The job market in the charming Montana town he and his family had moved to was tough and wages didn’t compare to those in Vegas, but he landed a solid job at a local architecture firm that treats employees like friends. I was about to say “like family” but that’s what they say—and often don’t mean—in corporate.

It really was a great job with lovely people he still considers friends, but when you want to work for yourself, no job will satisfy you for long. Because in the end, it’s still a job. A job with rules and structure and expectations—all good things, but we dreamers value our independence to a fascinating degree.

As he considered paths to self-employment, he considered freelancing full-time in his zone of expertise. He’d been working with Revit, an architectural rendering software, for over a decade and was well-connected in the industry. But that former job of his had unwittingly planted some pretty big seeds for building his own software company, and being a full-time freelancer wasn’t what he actually wanted to do. It was the safe option.

He had a less safe option in mind. You see, he had this small idea for a small app he called PIG (Preview Image Generator), a small subscription utility costing subscribers $139 per year. Every part of it was uncertain except for the fact that he had a solution to an unmet problem.

Taking a chance on your ideas

Things were tight, so it was a gamble to spend $5,000 of their precious savings on developing this app. However, his wife was supportive, and Parley was determined to do his best to sell it. He found an amazing developer in Brazil on UpWork, had the thing made, and built a simple website and fulfillment flow.  And his efforts to sell it led to sales—wahoo!

PIG gave him a taste of what this could be like and his next thought was, “Well, I have a developer now, and can see how this all works.” It was time to tackle the next, bigger challenge. He had observed over the years a real pain point in the BIM (Building Information Modeling) industry and had a solution for it that no one else was offering. So he decided to make it. Others might’ve paid a firm big bucks to build it, but he did it the bootstrappy Montana way—working with the contract developer in Brazil, a web guy in Romania, and basically doing as much as possible on the cheap. 

What’s the solution? In Parley’s words, “At the core, Guardian essentially connects each user’s software to make sure they are used in a standardized way.” It’s like a lot of industries where there are style guides. Said style guides (think brand guidelines, naming conventions, etc.) are meant to be read and implemented by employees, but often are not in the busyness of everything else. Guardian does the equivalent of enforcing a company’s style guide, meaning it won’t let users save or create things that don’t meet the firm’s standards. 

According to Parley:

It’s like healthy guardrails. If you don’t have that, your management spends a lot of time going back and fixing things. We call it whack-a-mole, where you keep going back and fixing the same thing. That’s what we’re solving for.

But it’s not an easy problem to solve and if he were easily daunted, he probably would’ve kept the solution and his dream to bring it to market drafted up somewhere on his Microsoft Surface. Thankfully, he was and is not easily daunted.

This time the investment was a larger $20,000 home equity loan, of which he spent $19,000 building a bare-bones version 1.

But Parley didn’t wait to have it finished and ready before he started selling it. Oh no. He leveraged his contacts from that not-so-great job as well as those who’d purchased PIG. All along the way, he reached out to these people to ask, “Hey, can I show you what I’m working on? Is this something you’d want?” 

One of the customers he’d worked with at that earlier job was enthusiastic in his response: “If you can create this solution, we will definitely buy it.” Another guy was even more direct: “Mate, send me a bill. I’ll be your first customer.” In case “mate” didn’t give it away, this early supporter was Australian. 

Not everyone was supportive, though. Among all the people excited about the idea, he remembers getting his first skeptical response. And while he doesn’t remember the particulars of that first skeptic, he remembers thinking, “I look forward to the day that they’re buying. I’ll show them.” And he has—his solution’s success in the industry is very well-known.

Where is Guardian now and what’s the vision for the future with it?

As of May 2024, Guardian is a company of 15 employees. They’re profitable, have had 80% revenue growth year-over-year, and have had no business debt. The limited personal debt they incurred to launch is a distant memory. They meet all the metrics of success used by SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, have users in 15 countries, and got enough attention in even the first couple years to have companies approach him about acquiring or merging technologies. The cash was tempting, but he always declined. He wanted to keep building his own thing, his own way.

In response to my question about the vision for Guardian, he paused.

Of course, my mind goes to our roadmap. But basically, I just want to see how much of a change we can make in the industry. We’re enjoying the journey.

Was there a major turning point?

I asked Parley if there was a day when he realized, “Hey, I think this is really going to work.” Part of me wants there to be some magical moment when the scales of certainty and uncertainty shift. You know what I’m talking about—a specific phone call, a specific deal, a specific day when the clouds part, the sun shines bright, and all of a sudden certainty outweighs uncertainty by a mile.

His answer, as I reflect on it, was not surprising at all. “No,” he said and gave a bit of a laugh. “It’s been 5 years, and it’s just been really gradual. I was laid-off, got my next job at Locati and started working on this on the side. I slowly tapered off at Locati, and quit when I couldn’t grow it anymore with the limited time I had.” He didn’t have a big “quit day” where he suddenly started working for himself, or a day when suddenly it all started working out. It was all working out all along. 

Favorite moments from the early days?

His favorite moments:

• “The first big check for $7,000 or $8,000, then a year later a $60,000 one.”

• “My first PIG purchase for $139.” (It was from a total stranger on his website.)

• “Setting up our first booth at one of the conferences. It felt like such an expense. What’s the reaction going to be like this? It almost brought tears to my eyes, the feeling of unity I had with my family.” He had driven out to Seattle with his family and setting up the booth was a family affair. “Owen was really proud of his dad as he helped me set it up and even Thea was crawling around pretending to help.”

The family helping Parley set up his first booth in 2019. Please note the itty-bitty hammer in baby Thea's hands.

My favorite moments from my front-row seat:

• Hearing about him hustling to or from the nearby public library on his lunch break for sales calls with prospective clients.

• Being asked business logistics questions he hadn’t thought through yet—e.g. “When does your fiscal year close?” or “Do you follow the cash or accrual method?”— and either deciding on the spot, or telling them outright he didn’t know.

• Joking about the “stocked kitchen” (the fixings for a peanut butter sandwich) in his small office. The yoga mat for naps under the desk.

• The lovely people he’s working with and the way he talks about them. He is full of respect and appreciation for each of the Guardian team members. 

Take-aways for dreamers:

What can all dreamers learn from the story of Parley Burnett and Guardian?

1. Be okay with uncertainty. He and his wife left traditional health benefits and joined a medical cost sharing program for the first couple years. I currently use something similar.

2. Laugh about the stuff you didn’t or don’t know. Think things like, “This is great material for my founding story.”

3. Be disciplined. He’s up at 5:00AM many mornings.

4. Try to stay focused on what matters most. During these 5 years since he went out on his own, he tries to prioritize family time, always takes Sundays off to focus on church and family, goes on frequent dates with his wife, serves his community through church, prioritizes exercise, and does the basic stuff life requires of all of us.

5. Don’t over-polish what you’re building before you share it. Get an MVP out there.

6. Be careful who you counsel with and take counsel from. Don’t spend all your time chasing or consuming advice—spend your time building your solution.

7. Focus on necessity first, then a belief in yourself. Do what you need to do, and believe you can bring it about.

8. Be direct with your employer as soon as you can be. It’s wise to not share everything with them, especially when there’s low-trust, but if you’re going to try to straddle two horses, you’ll feel better about doing so if you’ve been as upfront as possible with a boss you trust.

9. Let crummy treatment in the past be fuel to prove the skeptics wrong.

10. At some point, you have to jump before you see how it’s all going to work out.

11. Have integrity and don’t posture.

12. Dream with your spouse, make it a shared “we” dream.

13. Be patient.

14. Big dreams are more motivating than small, subsistence-level ones.

Concluding thoughts

As often seems to be the case, the best has been saved for last. You see, I didn’t set out to write this article. We were simply chatting about life and work and how it was going. He was sharing excitement about and gratitude for the Guardian team and each person who’s taken a chance to join a start-up. And telling me about new deals and how much more he wants to be able to do for the customers Guardian serves.

But it was when we got to talking about the people who believed early on, that the idea to write this article was sparked. You should’ve heard the gratitude in his voice, deep gratitude for the people who believed in him early on. “[Their support] meant everything,” he said, reflecting on the first buyers. That’s why this article needed to be written now, while these early days of angsting and risking-big and having people take a chance on him are so gratefully remembered.

It was one dreamer at a time who believed in what he was building, how it would improve their work, and went to bat to take a chance on Guardian. Their early support and willingness to take a chance on something unproven meant—and still means—the world to him.

A final word to the dreamers:

In his usual measured way, Parley took his time with this answer.

I would say to dreamers that you can build anything by making small moves. Start selling early so it motivates you. I’ve worked really hard, but it’s not out of reach for anybody. It’s not magic and I didn’t get completely lucky. Back to some of the guys I worked with at the previous company, I’m surprised they didn’t see any of the possibilities I did. Trust that the problems you see can be solved—by you—and that they will sell.

I like it. All of it. It’s not magic—it’s dreaming, it’s trusting, it’s creating solutions, and it’s making moves, and it’s making a difference. So here’s to more dreamers like us making our own moves to create the futures we want and changing industries and the futures of others as we do so. 

If you enjoyed this piece, I’d love to hear about it! Please share comments or follow-up questions via comments (paid subscribers), by replying to this email, or at emily@emilyburnett.me.

1. https://globalleadership.org/articles/leading-yourself/gls21-notes-believe-it/