Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping TrendHim from a Small Town to $12M

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

What a wonderful story of an e-commerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. When we spoke in 2019, all of the 60 employees working under TrendHim CEO Sebastian Petersen were working out of Horsens.

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?

Sebastian Petersen: I’m from Denmark. I would say I had a pretty ordinary background. Both my parents were working in the public sector. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit together with one of my best buddies growing up. We were always together.

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Featured Videos

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare (Part 1)

We discuss IoT use cases in commercial real estate and the open opportunities thereof.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Tim Panagos: I’m the Founder and CTO of Microshare. We’re the market-leading wireless IoT platform built for commercial real estate.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on that and talk about how IoT features in real estate.

Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 1)

This interview is a fascinating look into the world of Gaming. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Matthew Benson: I’m born and raised in Ohio. I grew up an hour south of Columbus in a small town called Chillicothe. There wasn’t much going on down there.

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Catching Up On Readings: Crypto Funding H1’22

This feature from Crunchbase News analyzes the funding trends for crypto startups. Investment in VC-backed crypto companies slowed during the first half of the year to about $9.3 billion. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

July 21 – 583rd 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 583rd FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, July 21, 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!

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 6)

Mikel Lindsaar: The really cool thing about StoreConnect business model is that Salesforce gets their license revenue and they get a very sticky customer who then is investing more into the platform. The partners love it because they get a client who has an upfront setup fee but has a part of their business related to that partner’s consulting revenue.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a global customer base?

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes. We’re focused on Australia while we were launching it, but we’ve got customers in America, and companies in Australia that have stores in Singapore, the UK, and Europe. We now have two or three partners in America. That’s all going to kick off this year as we do our America expansion.

The goal is to get it up to a point where someone acquires us. I’d be very surprised if Salesforce doesn’t acquire. It’s an SMB e-commerce solution that they don’t have. They can’t take their B2C solution and make it small business-friendly because it’s going to piss off their enterprise customers. They just can’t reprice it. StoreConnect has been interesting. Our first investor was our first client.

Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 5)

Marnix Broer: We didn’t really have to dilute ownership to raise €100,000. However, if we didn’t have the €100,000, the decisions we made were probably tougher to make. If you have some money, you dare to take a bit more risk. It might have actually made a difference.

Later on in 2016, we raised from two venture capitalists – one in Amsterdam and one from Berlin. We showed them that we had a great working system in the Netherlands. We had a product-market fit. We were making revenues. We’ve just done the test in Belgium, Spain, and Australia. The students love the product as well.