Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who on your team was the key sales guy?

David Chmielewski: That’s Joe McLean who’s now our CEO. He was able to sell and fill clients with that confidence. I also did a fair amount of sales myself, but it was more of solutions consulting and technical design. Joe and I got into a pretty good pattern where he’d handle the business folks and I’d handle the ops and technology folks. We would tackle sales in that direction and it got a lot of deals done.

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Best of Bootstrapping: What is the Best Bootstrapping Tactic for B-to-B Startups?

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

What is the best bootstrapping tactic for B-to-B startups? Solve an acute customer pain. Get paid an advance to do so. Leeyo Software Founder Jagan Reddy followed this strategy to bootstrap to $20 million. He built a niche software that solved a very specific problem and started selling it to enterprises for a lot of money. This story from 2016 is a textbook case study of how well you can scale with no outside financing if you can identify a burning pain point and customers who are willing to pay a LOT to solve that pain. Leeyo Software was acquired by Zuora in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jagan Reddy: I was born in India. All my schooling was done in India.

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September 29 – 592nd 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 592nd FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, September 29, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

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591st Roundtable Recording with Anirudh Damani, Artha Venture Fund

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: September 22 – Spotlight on India’s Startup Ecosystem

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. We had a terrific discussion on the Indian Startup Ecosystem and its trends.

Wast-e-collecter

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Puneet Agarwal from Jaipur, India, pitch Wast-e-collector, a concept stage venture.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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According to a recent report, the global digital signature market size was estimated to grow at 28% CAGR from $4.4 billion in 2021 to $42 billion by 2030. DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU) recently announced its second quarter results that surpassed market expectations, but the company’s outlook was not too impressive.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve touched upon a few different open opportunities. One is you talked about the gap in the visualization space. There are a lot of data solutions but, when it comes to presenting, there’s a lot more to be done.

The second thing that I find interesting is a lot of technologies especially on the data engineering side are very expensive. They are affordable for large enterprises, but when it comes down to small businesses, it’s not accessible. Where is the affordable version of that?

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 5)

David Chmielewski: The closer you can stick to having a real product, the better you’re going to come out in the end. It’s really those first three or four clients that help refine your product and allow you to understand what’s truly different and what’s not. We had the experience at BoA. At First Tech, we had the experience of two clients, so we had some ideas.

Our next two clients were Golden One Credit Union and CardWorks. By the time we were done with them, we knew what our product should look like. We had a breadth of knowledge that allowed us to say that this is what our product is.