Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped by Piggybacking to $6M from Romania

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

You may have read our PaaS coverage, as well as Bootstrapping by Piggybacking posts. Well, when we spoke in 2020, 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu had built a $6 million SaaS business using this methodology with just $1 million in funding. What’s more, he had done it entirely from Romania and selling to largely a US customer base. Excellent story!

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?

Florin Cornianu: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of 123FormBuilder. We are a form-building SaaS. The company is in Romania. I was born in a small city in the northern part of Romania. I’m an engineer by profession. I graduated with computer science degree from a large university in the city where I live.

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1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Bootstrapping

Over the course of two years, we have released over 70 courses on Udemy with the aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally. This series of posts aims to help you find the one you need easily and provide you with discount coupons.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services and Piggybacking

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

Mikel Lindsaar 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 of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Mikel Lindsaar: I’m Australian. I was born in Adelaide in South Australia which is the driest state in the driest nation.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services

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

Quavo Co-founder David Chmielewski 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 the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

David Chmielewski: I was born in Michigan in a small tourism-driven town. They have good schools but generally not a tremendous amount of job opportunities if you wanted to do something in technology. I was one of the lucky people who always knew what I wanted to do. I was exposed to computers pretty early.

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Generative AI: A Strategy Blueprint for Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship

Ever since ChatGPT was made available to the general public, everybody is talking about how it will impact the world as we know it. 

ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models (LLMs). Generative AI is trained on vast amounts of data that enable it to understand and respond like a human. It helps create new content from previously created content. It can write and debug computer programs, compose music, plays, and student essays, and answer test questions. 

OpenAI’s Journey and Financials

OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 with a stated goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, Infosys, and YC Research pledged over $1 billion to the venture. 

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped by Piggybacking from Romania

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

You may have read our PaaS coverage, as well as Bootstrapping by Piggybacking posts. Well 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu has built a $6 million SaaS business using this methodology with just $1 million in funding. What’s more, he has done it entirely from Romania and sells to largely a US customer base. Excellent story!

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?

Florin Cornianu: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of 123FormBuilder. We are a form-building SaaS. The company is in Romania. I was born in a small city in the northern part of Romania. I’m an engineer by profession. I graduated with computer science degree from a large university in the city where I live.

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