Best of Bootstrapping: Founder Bootstrapped to Over $35M

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

In these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times. Here, BannerBuzz Founder and CEO Nishant Shah shares how he bootstrapped to over $35 million in 2019 revenue.

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?

Nishant Shah: I was born and raised in Ahmedabad, India. I studied civil engineering at the university, and then went on to do my masters in construction management from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

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Video FAQs

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You knew the specs of what needed to be built. That kind of domain knowledge is invaluable.

David Chmielewski: Right. We knew what we wanted to build. We already built it. Our flagship product is a dispute system. At BoA, I had already built three of them. We didn’t have a single line of code, but I knew what we had done and I knew how to make it better. I know First Tech saw that. We were all confident that we could do this.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Wearables is a very interesting industry that is going to be entirely design-driven. What about on the IT side whether it’s a healthcare IT or software-driven solution? What have you invested in that is interesting?

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Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 3)

David Chmielewski: We established Quavo as a virtual company. We used most of the methodology that we learned at BoA. How do you run a remote company? We all decided to leave our positions and start the company.

We knew our platform like what we wanted to build on. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to work in financial services. We wanted to build products. We wanted them to be repeatable from one financial institution to another. It was very difficult to bootstrap from that.