What We Learned from Jesse Alton on The Founders Journey Podcast
The Founders Journey Podcast has a way of digging up the kinds of stories that don’t usually make headlines. The ones without champagne launches or celebrity VCs. The kind that starts with a problem in the real world, not a pitch deck. That’s exactly what happened when Jesse Alton stepped behind the mic. His voice was calm, a little gravelly, and came packed with quiet grit. You wouldn’t guess it now, but the guy running a SaaS company used to measure success by whether the cows made it through the winter.
He built GrainStack, a software tool that helps small manufacturers and farms manage inventory without needing IT departments or consultants. It now supports over 3,000 businesses across North America. But the first version? It lived in a busted Chromebook, coded in the back of a milking shed, and saved to a Google Sheet.
The morning Jesse recorded the episode, he told host Melissa Carter he was already on his second coffee. A ceramic mug clinked as he set it down. Outside his Iowa home office, you could hear a rooster in the background.
TL;DR
- The “barn problem” that led to a SaaS product
- The bet he made that almost broke him
- Why he kept rejecting investor money
- What makes tiny users better than big ones
- His one rule for keeping burnout away
- The moment it all clicked on a grain delivery
- The best advice he got from a mechanic
It started with a barn full of barley
Back in 2015, Jesse was 26 and still living at home, helping run his family’s farm. The margins were shrinking every season. Feed prices were up. Crop yields were down. The worst part? Their records were always off.
“I’d go to the barn thinking we had three pallets of corn, and there’d be half a busted bag left,” he said on the podcast. “We were losing money from missing inventory we thought we had.”
So he did what any frustrated farm kid with a laptop would do. He stayed up late after chores, typed with frozen fingers, and built a tool for tracking feed levels. The logic was simple. Workers would fill out a webform from their phones. The data would update a live sheet. Boom. No more surprises.
It was ugly. It worked.
Three neighboring farms asked if they could try it. Jesse said sure, made them copies, and thought that would be the end of it. But then word got around. Over the next year, he got requests from across the county. By 2017, a feed supplier in Nebraska offered to pay him monthly if he added inventory alerts. That’s when he stopped calling it a project.
He called it GrainStack.
Short sentence here. Cold wind stung his hands.
The power of saying no to good money
Jesse kept it lean. No pitch decks, no startup contests. He funded the early years with freelance web work and savings from harvest seasons. The platform grew slowly, then steadily. In 2019, he had 600 paying users and no staff. That’s when investors started calling.
“I got emails with numbers that looked fake,” he said. “One guy offered 400K if I could move to Austin.”
Jesse turned every offer down. Not because he didn’t need the money, but because he didn’t want the pressure to grow beyond his users’ needs.
“They wanted dashboards and team analytics. But 90% of my customers were one guy in a barn with an iPhone 6. He didn’t need graphs. He needed alerts when oats ran low.”
For a while, that decision nearly tanked the business. Support tickets piled up. Code broke. One winter, Jesse almost quit. His voice cracked for half a second as he told Melissa about it.
“I remember staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, thinking, I’ve made something people need, and I’m still broke. Maybe I made the wrong call.”
But by spring, a grain supplier in Alberta rolled GrainStack out to 80 clients at once. That changed the math. It gave him room to hire a support rep and a part-time dev. From there, things clicked.
Why his customers are better than yours
Melissa asked what makes his user base so loyal. Jesse didn’t blink.
“They tell the truth. These are not people who sugarcoat. If the app breaks, I get a text in all caps. If it works, I get paid.”
He shared a story from 2020. A user in Arkansas, an older guy named Mark, called him at 5:30 in the morning. His inventory was off by 12 tons. Jesse pulled over on a gravel road, debugged the issue from his phone, and fixed it in 40 minutes.
Mark mailed him a sack of fresh corn two weeks later.
It’s a reminder that small users aren’t small. They’re close. You can call them. You can hear their trucks in the background. Jesse still answers tickets twice a week, even now.
Every Friday, he joins three customers for a video call. They don’t know each other. They don’t know he’s the founder. He listens to how they talk, not what they say. That’s where the real feedback hides.
One short sentence. He listens more than he talks.
Burnout, feed trucks, and building a life around the work
The interview shifted tone when Melissa asked how he avoids burnout. Jesse paused for a while before answering.
“I almost didn’t. I went 18 months without taking a day off. It broke something in me.”
He went on to explain how he now treats his company like a field. It needs rotation. Needs seasons. Mondays are for support. Tuesdays for bugs. Fridays end at 2.
The real change came when he bought a secondhand camper and started working from different farms every month. He parks near customers. Fixes bugs between deliveries. Learns how they work. It keeps him out of the bubble.
In August 2023, he was parked in South Dakota. A feed truck pulled in, driver waved, and asked if he was the “GrainStack guy.” Said the alerts helped him make a second run that week.
“That made the last six years feel worth it.”
A final lesson from a guy with grease on his hands
The episode wrapped with one last story. Jesse was 19 when his dad’s truck broke down during a storm. They had no money for repairs, so a local mechanic named Walt offered to help. Walt was a big guy with thick glasses and hands covered in grease.
As Jesse watched him fix the transmission, he asked how he knew what to do.
Walt said, “I don’t. But I’ve broken enough of these to know where not to look.”
That stuck.
“Every time I ship code or make a hire, I hear that in my head,” Jesse said. “You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know what to leave alone.”
Not everything from the episode made it into this writeup. But that line might be the one that matters most.
What Stuck After the Mics Went Cold
- Jesse built GrainStack for one farm and ended up serving thousands.
- He skipped funding and grew on customer revenue, even when it hurt.
- His users aren’t tech-savvy, but they’re honest and fast with feedback.
- Burnout nearly ended the story. Seasonal work habits saved it.
- Big growth came from staying small enough to listen.
- Sometimes the smartest move is knowing where not to dig.
Contact Us if you’ve built something from scratch and want to share your story with the world!