Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrap a SaaS Company from Finland

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

Vainu.io Co-founder Mikko Honkanen has steadily built an excellent SaaS company from Finland and when we spoke in 2017, was expanding into the US as well. Read on for more.

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

Mikko Honkanen: I was born in a small town in Finland, 20 miles up north from Helsinki. I studied at Helsinki School of Economics. I also studied at Oxford. Then I spent the last 10 years in the SaaS business. I spent almost seven years at a Norwegian company called Meltwater.

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June 9 – 578th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 578th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, June 9, 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!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel, Managing Director of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 1)

Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, is one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction to where you are with your work with Ohio Innovation Fund. What’s happening in Ohio as an ecosystem?

Video FAQs

Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Britt, get us to the point where you launched Dow Janes. How did you get yourselves off the ground?

Britt Baker: It’s the fall of 2019. I have another job at that time that I decided was not my passion. I’d be going to dinner parties and cocktail parties and everyone would ask when’s the next Dow Janes meeting. I knew that Laurie-Anne had started an online business before. I called Laurie-Anne. She was about eight months pregnant.

577th Roundtable Recording with Chandrashekar Kupperi, Peaceful Progress Fund

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

577th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Chandrashekar Kupperi, Peaceful Progress Fund

Chandrashekar Kupperi is General Partner at Peaceful Progress Fund, an angel fund in India. We have some very interesting discussions on consumer startups in India, especially the ones targeting lower economic strata consumers.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Linguamatics to Over $10M from the UK

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

Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story from 2017 traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, including Co-founder Roger Hale, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business.

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

Roger Hale: I think I had quite a normal upbringing. I grew up in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. My mother came from a family with a local manufacturing business. She also ran a restaurant for a while. My father was an academic. He was a mathematician. He had actually been a code breaker and worked with some of the very first computers as part of that. I didn’t obviously know that until later.

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Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 1)

Facebook gets a tremendous bad rap for its many nefarious side effects. Numerous small businesses, however, have been possible because of Facebook’s incredible Ad engine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What is the story leading up to this? We’ll do Laurie-Anne as well in that mode.