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.

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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.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did this idea come from?

Mikel Lindsaar: From the services business. reinteractive does a lot of customer applications connected to Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: Are all your product ideas from your services business?

Mikel Lindsaar: MetaPulse was something that I always wanted to build. I created my services business so I can create MetaPulse. StoreConnect came out of reinteractive.

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Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 4)

Marnix Broer: For us, that was the challenge to show that we can launch StuDocu anywhere in the world from the Netherlands. Eventually, it worked out. Spain was great to show that we can do it in any language. Australia was great to show how far you can go without going there physically. We could have proven that by simply going to Germany or UK. In the end, it’s more about launching from the Netherlands while it’s abroad.

Sramana Mitra: What does it entail besides putting the website together? How did you launch in different geographies?

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though you had co-founders, there was no outside money.

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes, everything was bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about four SaaS apps now. Three of them you exited, and one is still running.

Best of Bootstrapping: The Journey Through Failure to Success

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

Entrepreneurs love to discuss success. Few are willing to discuss what they tried and failed at. When we spoke in 2019, Robly Co-founder Adam Robinson did a terrific job of sharing his journey through various failed experiments to a model that was gaining traction.

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?

Adam Robinson: I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I went to Rice University. I graduated in 2003. One of my friends had an internship at Goldman-Sachs the year before.

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Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Marnix Broer: This was in 2014. That was the moment we tried to see if we can go abroad. At that moment, we had two challenges. One was, can we make a business out of this? The main goal is to help students all over the world. As a company, you have to be healthy to survive. We needed a business model.

We’d launched in all universities in the Netherlands. Now we had to broaden our audience and expand our market. We did that. We implemented a premium system. That’s where the business model came in.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was reinteractive?

Mikel Lindsaar: reinteractive is a consulting business. We do software development. I really wanted to build a SaaS business, but I didn’t have the resources or the people to start it. I didn’t have any way to get funding at that point.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing – starting with a consulting company – is a very common way. We have a whole track in One Million by One Million that we call Bootstrapping Using Services.