Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did the inbound interest come from? What countries?

Juha Lehtonen: We currently have clients in 17 countries. We get contacts from the Baltics, UK, Switzerland, and the Middle East.

Sramana Mitra: They come to you and you sell through online touchpoints. You don’t have to go visit people.

Juha Lehtonen: Yes.

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Sramana Mitra: Was there any technology element to what you were providing?

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Video FAQs

Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All your early customers were in Finland?

Juha Lehtonen: Yes, the early customers were local. Once we were up and running, it took us about a year and a half to launch the product. We did it very gradually. Around 2008, we heard that there was a couple of Swedish guys in sales who were setting up their company in Sweden.

Their goal was to find two or three software products that they wanted to represent. We were able to get started with them. We were among those three software that they represented in Sweden. That was the beginning of a little bit of the international market.

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Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the deal sizes?

Juha Lehtonen: It was very little – annual fees of €20,000. It was more like an advertisement for us. In addition to developing the platform, we did quite a lot of projects. We needed to self-finance. After the initial investment, we didn’t raise any other capital. That was the only capital we got. We ended up building up a consultation business.