Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Service from Wisconsin

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SignalWire Founder CEO Anthony Minessale is building a very interesting programmable communication platform company that has its roots in Wisconsin. This conversation is from 2020.

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?

Anthony Minessale: I’m from the Midwest. I live in Wisconsin where I’ve lived all my life. I have been involved in computers since high school. After high school, I became interested in how the internet works. At that time, the internet was starting to take off. I started to teach myself programming.

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Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to pick on, what was the process?

David Chmielewski: My initial endeavors were around disputes. It was always near and dear to our hearts. For Joe, one of the other co-founders, that’s where he started. His first job was at Bank of America as a call center agent. This was the fundamental use case.

More important than that, having a good business case for clients when we sell. We can save our clients so much money by selling them dispute systems. Some of the other products didn’t have the business value that disputes do. It wasn’t a technology decision; it was more around how we can make our clients successful and to what level we can save them money.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who on your team was the key sales guy?

David Chmielewski: That’s Joe McLean who’s now our CEO. He was able to sell and fill clients with that confidence. I also did a fair amount of sales myself, but it was more of solutions consulting and technical design. Joe and I got into a pretty good pattern where he’d handle the business folks and I’d handle the ops and technology folks. We would tackle sales in that direction and it got a lot of deals done.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 5)

David Chmielewski: The closer you can stick to having a real product, the better you’re going to come out in the end. It’s really those first three or four clients that help refine your product and allow you to understand what’s truly different and what’s not. We had the experience at BoA. At First Tech, we had the experience of two clients, so we had some ideas.

Our next two clients were Golden One Credit Union and CardWorks. By the time we were done with them, we knew what our product should look like. We had a breadth of knowledge that allowed us to say that this is what our product is.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You knew the specs of what needed to be built. That kind of domain knowledge is invaluable.

David Chmielewski: Right. We knew what we wanted to build. We already built it. Our flagship product is a dispute system. At BoA, I had already built three of them. We didn’t have a single line of code, but I knew what we had done and I knew how to make it better. I know First Tech saw that. We were all confident that we could do this.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 3)

David Chmielewski: We established Quavo as a virtual company. We used most of the methodology that we learned at BoA. How do you run a remote company? We all decided to leave our positions and start the company.

We knew our platform like what we wanted to build on. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to work in financial services. We wanted to build products. We wanted them to be repeatable from one financial institution to another. It was very difficult to bootstrap from that.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why were you looking for remote work?

David Chmielewski: I had found my wife at Auto Owners, got married, and didn’t want to leave. I grew up in Michigan. I still live there. I wanted to have the ability to spread my wings a little bit, but I knew it wasn’t necessarily going to be an option to stay in Michigan with an on-premise job. I found this remote job.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find a remote job back then?

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 1)

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 the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?