Dave transitioned from a developer to an entrepreneur by leveraging his solid domain knowledge in a particular area of FinTech: dispute resolution for credit card transactions. He and his co-founders effectively used bootstrapping using services and piggybacked on the Pega Systems platform. Read on to learn more about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at
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
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
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
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.
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
Mikel has built a services company in Australia and spawned six SaaS products out of it. One of them, StoreConnect, is a terrific Bootstrapping by Piggybacking story on top of Salesforce.com. He has exited four of the apps and expects to grow StoreConnect to $100M+ in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning
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.