Roundtable Recap: April 21 – Spotlight on the Northern European Startup Ecosystem

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Andrus Oks, Founding Partner at Tera Ventures, based in Estonia. We had a great discussion on the Baltic and Scandinavian countries in particular.

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As for entrepreneur pitches, today we had Elif Aydin from New York, pitching PeeP, an app for identifying street parking. Also an excellent discussion.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Featured Videos

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 1)

Often niche ideas are great to build capital-efficient, profitable startups on.

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?

Joris Kroese: I was born in a small village close to Amsterdam. I was born in 1977. I studied Information Engineering. After my studies, I started my first venture which was an e-commerce venture selling, mainly, consumer electronics in Benelux and Spain. I did that for about 10 years.

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a tool that I use when we teach our entrepreneurs about building a sales funnel. We call it pain extraction questions. When you start discussions, you ask questions about a pain. What is your first pain extraction question?

Mahendra Alladi: How often do you get bit by a production bug? How many escalations do you take because of delayed release cycles? The answers are also very common. This is something that is a burning issue. I don’t really have to sell a lot. The problem is easily acknowledged.

Video FAQs

Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you need equity financing or were you doing it completely on the basis of that seed round and these lending facilities?

Brent Jackson: In between, we did do another seed round for $2.4 million in equity fund.

Sramana Mitra: This was from a VC?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you primarily go after the large enterprises?

Mahendra Alladi: Of late, we focus more on the large enterprises, but it’s a mix.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to a million-dollar ARR?

Mahendra Alladi: Within the first year.

Sramana Mitra: You continue to bootstrap?

Best of Bootstrapping: More Bootstrapping to Exit Case Studies

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

I hope you read my article Bootstrapping to Exit. As a follow-up, let me offer you some case studies.

From Freshworks Has Acquired Nine Capital Efficient Startups:

All the nine acquisitions by Freshworks have been for undisclosed amounts. Cloud-based video collaboration platform 1CLICK, acquired in 2015, was founded in 2012 and had raised an undisclosed seed round from Blume Ventures and The Chennai Angels in 2014.

Online social discovery platform Frilp, acquired in 2015, was founded in 2012 and had raised $500K in funding from angel investors, including Freshdesk CEO Girish Mathrubootham in August 2014 and an undisclosed venture round with Microsoft Accelerator. It had over 100K users.

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Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing the software work?

Brent Jackson: We have a team in India. I’m a sole founder. One of the investors at the last company had a lot of ties to consultants in India. We used them to build the first prototype.

Sramana Mitra: What about the earliest customers? Did you go back to the people you were working with?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the MVP that you came up with? You had worked in that domain and created a vision for what would be the product that you wanted to go out with. You say it’s accidental, but a lot of developers transitioning to entrepreneurs encounter problems in their work life and go on to solve that problem. It is a common path.

By the time you were in the second one, you had a very deep view having worked with thousands of customers. Out of all that you observed, what was the minimum that you could start getting into the market with?