Dan Martell

Dan Martell was born in the small city of Moncton, New Brunswick, and did not arrive at success on a straight line. By age 17 he had been arrested, done time in jail, and gone through court-ordered rehab. That origin is not a footnote in his biography — he talks about it openly on podcasts, on stage, and in the opening chapters of his book — because the pivot from that version of himself to the one the business world now knows is the thing he thinks other people need to see.

His first company, Spheric Technologies, was a consulting firm he built and sold within five years. He followed it with Flowtown, a social-media marketing tool he co-founded and exited, and then Clarity.fm, an on-demand expert advice marketplace that was acquired by Fundable in 2015. Three tech company exits inside a ten-year stretch, all before he turned the corner into the work he is best known for today.

In parallel with building, he was investing. By 2012 he had been named Canada’s top angel investor of the year. His portfolio now includes more than 100 early-stage bets, among them Intercom, Udemy, Unbounce, Getaround, and Foodspotting. Capital was one form of leverage. Teaching was about to become another.

In 2016 he founded SaaS Academy, a coaching program focused on B2B software-as-a-service founders scaling from one million to ten million in annual recurring revenue and beyond. Over the years that followed, SaaS Academy grew into one of the largest coaching companies in the world, with more than 1,000 founders enrolled across a network of alumni that now includes ClickFunnels, Proposify, Carrot, and Pray.com. The methodology — the Buyback Loop, the Replacement Ladder, the 1-3-1 Rule, the Perfect Week — became the proprietary IP that powered his second act.

In 2023 Penguin Random House published his first book, Buy Back Your Time. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and the clearest distillation to date of the system he has been refining across two decades of building and coaching. The core idea is straightforward: most founders hit a ceiling not because they lack ambition but because they are the bottleneck. Buy back your own calendar — delegate, automate, hire for outcomes, protect the hours that only you can do — and the business grows around you rather than because of you. Today he runs Martell Ventures, a holding company called Big Band Software that owns a stable of SaaS companies, and his own podcast and YouTube channel where he turns the same frameworks loose on a much wider audience. He is an Ironman athlete, a husband, and a father of two boys in Kelowna, British Columbia.