categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Bootstrapping Using Services
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
In this case study, Cognaize Founder Vahe Andonians talks a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?
Vahe Andonians: I was born in Iran. When I was a couple of weeks old, we moved to the United States. Then my parents moved to Austria. I grew up in Austria. I studied there. I studied high-frequency technology. I did my first job there. From there, we went to Germany. I’ve lived in Germany now for 12 years.
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services to a $300M+ Exit
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Victor Allis bootstrapped Quintiq to $30M, raised funding, and then sold the company for over $300M. ActiVote is his second startup, currently self-funded.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the beginning. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Victor Allis: I was born in the Netherlands to a middle-class family. My dad worked as a plant manager in the aircraft industry. My mom took care of five kids. I was the youngest of five with four sisters. In school, I was the second-best in math in the Netherlands. I took part in competitions. I became a math student with the dream of becoming a math professor.
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.
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services to $35M, Then Raised $70M
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Teamwork.com Founder CEO Peter Coppinger has led a terrific vertical cloud business from Ireland and now runs a global SaaS company that is kicking ass.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Peter Coppinger: I’m the CEO of Teamwork.com. We are based in Ireland, but we have customers all over the world. I was born in West Cork, Ireland. At a young age, I was very inspired by the likes of Bill Gates. I couldn’t wait to get to college to get going. I thought I’d end up in the States. Somehow, I’m still in Ireland, but we do have a global footprint. I spend a lot of time in the States visiting customers.
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.
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services and Scaled Using Content Marketing
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
You have heard me discuss bootstrapping using services quite a lot. With Kinetic Data CEO John Sundberg’s story from 2014, we also take on another important key strategy for customer acquisition: content marketing.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised and in what kind of circumstances?
John Sundberg: I’m currently in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where our office is. I was born in Minneapolis. I’ve been in Minnesota all of my life. My wife is from Connecticut. My upbringing was very open-minded. My dad taught positive attitude and sales training and indirectly, I’ve had that positive attitude all my life. He ran his own company. It was a small company. As a result of watching that while growing up, I thought I wanted to work in a big company.
Use Bootstrapping with Services to Increase Your Probability of Fund Raising
Raising funding for startups in Silicon Valley is a low probability game. Fewer than 1% who try actually succeed.
Outside the Valley, the startup ecosystems are mostly immature, and the probability gets even lower.
The bar to raise seed funding is getting higher and higher. Seed investors are mostly operating as growth investors, expecting that the entrepreneur will somehow manage to bridge the gap and bring a concept to realization. In fact, what these investors really want is to invest in businesses that have traction, not just validation.
In short, they want to come to the rescue of victory.
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped CloudSense with Services on Force.com
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
When had this conversation in 2014, the Force.com platform – now Salesforce Platform – was a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Co-founder CTO Alex Fuller and Co-founder CEO Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform.
Sramana: Alex, let’s start with your personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial story?
Alex Fuller: I was born in Wimbledon in the UK where the tennis championship is held. My educational background was not focused on technology. I studied classics at Oxford University, which focused on Latin, Greek, and Linguistics. Before that, I had already acquired an interest in technology. I got into computing as a child when I was 12 years old. I had a keen interest in computing throughout my school years.
