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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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

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Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you build the platform yourself? Marnix Broer: Yes. I started with Jacques. He was my roommate in the student house. Soon we needed someone to build the website. That’s when I knocked on the door of my old friend from high school who was also studying in Delft. Later on, we saw

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Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 1)

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

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