In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. I am sure you are following the Bootstrapping to Exit (let’s call it B2E) articles. Last time, I showed you some case studies of larger companies who are acquiring bootstrapped startups. In this post, I will double-click down on the buy-side psychology of the B2E phenomenon.
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Andrus Oks, Founding Partner at Tera Ventures, based in Estonia. We had a great discussion on the Baltic and Scandinavian countries in particular. Peep As for entrepreneur pitches, today we had Elif Aydin from New York, pitching PeeP, an app for identifying street parking. Also an
Often niche ideas are great to build capital-efficient, profitable startups on. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Joris Kroese: I was born in a small village close to Amsterdam. I was born in 1977. I
Sramana Mitra: There is a tool that I use when we teach our entrepreneurs about building a sales funnel. We call it pain extraction questions. When you start discussions, you ask questions about a pain. What is your first pain extraction question? Mahendra Alladi: How often do you get bit by a production bug? How
Sramana Mitra: Did you need equity financing or were you doing it completely on the basis of that seed round and these lending facilities? Brent Jackson: In between, we did do another seed round for $2.4 million in equity fund. Sramana Mitra: This was from a VC?
Sramana Mitra: Do you primarily go after the large enterprises? Mahendra Alladi: Of late, we focus more on the large enterprises, but it’s a mix. Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to a million-dollar ARR? Mahendra Alladi: Within the first year. Sramana Mitra: You continue to bootstrap?
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. I hope you read my article Bootstrapping to Exit. As a follow-up, let me offer you some case studies. From Freshworks Has Acquired Nine Capital Efficient Startups: All the nine acquisitions by Freshworks have been for undisclosed amounts. Cloud-based video collaboration platform 1CLICK, acquired in 2015,