Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Once you decided that you wanted to own your own business, what were you going to do?

Alex Baydin: I was working at one of the internet companies that I mentioned. I actually got fired for the first time in my life. I’ve been working since I was 15. I took it really hard.

Sramana Mitra: Why were you fired?

Alex Baydin: The company was trying to get better performance out of a certain group. I was running the lead gen division there. I may have had a different communication style that my boss wasn’t a huge fan of. I just took it really hard. I ended up in the hospital that night. I felt literally sick to my stomach.

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Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 6)

Min Alexander: This business builds one by one. That’s a competitive moat for us. Folks that think they’re going to blast and market, that doesn’t necessarily happen in an industry like ours. It’s taken so long to disrupt it at scale. You need all the components. You need the technology and infrastructure to keep it simple and very accessible. You also need relationship builders who are holding these clients accountable in the markets that we’re in.

We build the brokers. We’ll have transactions that are also consistent. As long as we’re serving the brokers and delighting them with our quality, they’ll keep coming back. Every sales transaction brings two homeowners that we can serve throughout their entire homeownership journey. We have a seller who sold their home and a buyer who bought the home.

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 1)

RegTech is emerging to become a category of its own with numerous risk and compliance issues getting addressed by technology solutions. Alex has bootstrapped a wonderful business and is now doing a private equity-driven roll-up within the space.

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?

Video FAQs

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much have you raised in total so far?

Min Alexander: Our Series A round was $39 million. We had targeted $35 million. It got others really excited. We ended up declining other funding. We could have been well over $45 million.

Sramana Mitra: The story was pitched to me as a $5 million-plus company. Do you want to add some color to that?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. Is it venture-funded?

John Wu: We’re a customer-funded company. We view our customers as our partners in this. We have done several successful equity crowdfunding rounds in the last few years. We raised over $11 million in past rounds. A lot of it came from our customers who believe in what we’re doing. When you talk about how you’re getting the word out, that’s one of the ways.

Sramana Mitra: Which equity crowdfunding platform did you work on?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you finance this company?

Min Alexander: Earlier on, there was a lot of seed funding. Early seed investors like Meeting Street Capital, Idea Fund, and Venture South are still very active with growing portfolios.

Sramana Mitra: Are these North Carolina investors?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is that a commission model or a markup model?

Min Alexander: There’s a gross margin. We want to be competitive on price, but we’re also saving time and convenience. Then we’re able to deliver our services for ordering and tracking through a digital interface.

Sramana Mitra: What is the gross margin for your business?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a 100% Virtual Company from Ireland

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

Shane Evans is Co-founder of Scrapinghub, now known as Zyte, a virtual team-based business from Ireland. When we spoke in 2016, the company had 5M Euro in revenue, 130 employees in 43 countries and operated 100% virtually. Very interesting view into a different part of the world. You can listen to the podcast of our interview here.

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?

Shane Evans: I was actually born in the UK. Both of my parents worked at Heathrow. My father is British but my mother was Irish. I think their involvement and love for travel had an impact on me. I came to Ireland when I was two years old and that’s where I grew up.

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