Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a 100% Virtual Company from Ireland

Shane Evans is Founder of Scrapinghub, a virtual team-based business from Ireland with 5M Euro in revenue and employing over 130 people. They have employees in 43 countries and operate 100% virtually. Very interesting view into a different part of the world.

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?

Shane Evans: I was actually born in the UK. Both of my parents worked at Heathrow. My father is British but my mother was Irish. I think their involvement and love for travel had an impact on me. I came to Ireland when I was two years old and that’s where I grew up.

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Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why did Matt join your company?

Diego Gomes: We were growing and delivering good results with marketing our products. Our product was evolving and was generating leads, but we were struggling with learning sales. Our founders and the whole team was not familiar in that area.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The first year revenue was $800,000, and then how did that grow?

Diego Gomes: It started at $800,000, then it grew to $1.3 million to $2 million to $8 million. I would say between the year we grew our revenues from $2 million to $8 million was when we accelerated the most. We also started targeting outside of Brazil at that time. 

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your first client that was in the model that you found to be a possible success model. Who was that client? What were the circumstances? What did you do for that client? How did you get to the product-market fit?

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you launch as a software company or as a marketplace? 

Diego Gomes: I launched it as a software company. The first year was very challenging. Although we were having a little bit of success in selling to customers, the problem was that they were buying a content marketing platform, but they weren’t creating enough content.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 1)

Diego has built a terrific content marketing company from Brazil. He bootstrapped first, raised money later, and has recently acquired a sizable US company to scale. Excellent story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Tell me about your background. Where are you from? Where were you raised?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris

Europe is facing difficult times. Entrepreneurs are its best hope. BidMotion CEO Daniel Nathan is building a really cool company based in Paris.

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?

Daniel Nathan: I was born very close to Paris. I was born in 1988. My parents were not entrepreneurs, but I always wanted to create my own business. I started my first company when I was pretty young. Our city was not such a great city to live in. To go to Paris, you had to take a train. It was pretty dangerous to take that train.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Using Services to $12M

You know that we believe in the Bootstrapping Using Services methodology quite firmly. Here’s Square Root CEO Chris Taylor’s story, a great example of how and why bootstrapping using services works.

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?

Chris Taylor: I grew up in rural West Virginia. You won’t meet a lot of entrepreneurs out of West Virginia. When I was four, my father passed away, so my brother and I were raised by our mother. She did a fantastic job. My brother is also another entrepreneur. In college, I went to Carnegie-Mellon and studied Computer Science, Psychology, and Mathematics.

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