Best of Bootstrapping: EdTech Unicorn Bootstrapped First from Canada

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  In 2020, D2L Founder CEO John Baker shared this terrific story of bootstrapped entrepreneurship in EdTech. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? John Baker: I’m based

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Best of Bootstrapping: EdTech Unicorn First Bootstrapped from Canada

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  In 2020, D2L CEO John Baker shared this terrific story of bootstrapped entrepreneurship in EdTech. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? John Baker: I’m based in Waterloo,

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Best of Bootstrapping: EdTech Unicorn Bootstrapped First from Canada

D2L CEO John Baker shares a terrific story of bootstrapped entrepreneurship in EdTech. The company also has a great PaaS strategy. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? John Baker: I’m based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Strategy-wise, it’s still large accounts selling and just bigger deals? No major change on that front? John Baker: Not at that stage. We’re just accelerating that work and putting in place the infrastructure to grow faster. We did another round a couple of years later for another $80 million.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about a bit of metrics so we can pin the journey all the way to bootstrapping before you got a funded company model. How far did you get from a revenue point of view, customer metrics, employee metrics? What were the vital statistics? John Baker: We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that we should discuss about that bootstrapping period before we switch into the next inflection point? John Baker: One thing I would like to discuss is how we differentiated from the competition. In my case, I spent a lot of time on the engineering and design side.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The sales model at this point is still direct selling? John Baker: Yes, still the same. It had expanded into going to conferences to figure out who to talk to. Now we were talking to Deans or Provosts.  Sramana Mitra: How was the average deal size moving?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the very beginning, when you were going door to door asking people to sign up, what were you charging? John Baker: In the early days, I built a model that was based on cost per student. The faculty members that I reached out to didn’t have the budget for this. I said,

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