Sramana Mitra: What were the business metrics with that $500,000 and with that $1.2 million? How was the business moving?
Mike Salguero: When we first bought the website, it was a subscription business where the maker would pay an annual fee to be on the website. We scaled it pretty well. We had a whole team of salespeople and had all these leads.
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Booksy CEO Stefan Batory started a software development company in Poland with a few other partners. Today, he’s running a high-growth, VC-funded SaaS + marketplace business in the US. Awesome journey!
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.
Stefan Batory: I’m from Warsaw, Poland. I was born and raised in one of the poorest parts of the country. I got a scholarship and went to a high school here in the US back in 1994.

Peyman has done two startups in the ad network and content network field, and this discussion takes us through that 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?
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This is a fascinating story of a subscription service for high-quality meat being delivered to consumer homes.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
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We’re big believers in Bootstrapping Using Services, as you know. Here’s the story of CEO James Kane who scaled RWS to over $10 million in revenue using the method.
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?
James Kane: I grew up in a very small town in far northern New York. It’s a college town of about 2,000 people. My father was a university professor. He taught Mechanical Engineering at Clarkson University.

CEO Taylor Tyng has bootstrapped Wiredrive over a 17-year period to about $10 million. Today, he has options ahead to grow organically or raise money. Either way, an interesting journey.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Taylor Tyng: I was born south of Boston, Massachusetts in a town called Duxbury. I was born the son of two entrepreneurs who went through a line of businesses from early plastic mold injection technology companies and ended up working in a luxury travel business. I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early. I was raised in a middle class setting and my parents made sure that they raised children who were thoughtful and mindful. I had a real good platform to practice at an early age. By trade, I’m a designer. Art and commerce has always been a big part of my life.
Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire this very fragmented customer base?
Stefan Batory: Initially, we weren’t been thinking about that because we were supposed to work with that partner from southeast Florida who was supposed to acquire clients for us.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I thought you were trying to reposition the taxi company to doing a marketplace. How did you get to the software house?
Stefan Batory: I did not reposition the taxi business. I just kept it growing. At the same time, I was also running a small division of the software development house, which was a spinoff from that original software development house.
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