Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 3)

Stefan Batory: At the same time, I was preparing for a Marathon race on the Sands. It’s a marathon across the Sahara desert. You have to carry a backpack with all your food and supplies to survive in the desert.

I started having some aches and pains in my legs, so I had to see a physiotherapist. Being a father of two, I wanted to spend some time with my children after I got back home from work. I used to do my workouts at 9PM or 10PM.

Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 2)

Stefan Batory: After 12 years of running that first company, I got a little bit tired of growing a company that was in the service business. To double the revenue, I had to double the headcount. When we got to over 200 engineers, I didn’t feel like I wanted to hire another 200 to double our revenue the next year and then 400 to double it the following year.

I started looking for a different business model that would help me to grow the topline without growing the team as much. At the end of 2011, I decided to launch the first taxi hailing app in Poland. We launched that in February 2012.

Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 1)

Stefan 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!

Best of Bootstrapping: CEO Bootstraps Using Services to Millions from Russia

We’ve discussed Bootstrapping Using Services extensively over the years. Ecwid CEO Ruslan Fazlyev used eLance (not Upwork) to source service projects, then built, first a platform+services business that scaled to over $10 million in revenue. Then he spun off a pure play e-commerce platform business that now has over a million merchants using it. Revenue is over $5 million.

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?

Ruslan Fazlyev: I was born in a very little town in Russia. I grew up in Ulyanovsk, which is a city on the Russian river Volga. The city that you grew up in interests you more than the place of birth. What’s interesting about that place is it’s the place where Lenin was born – the guy who founded USSR. Because it’s Lenin’s birthplace, the communists want to make sure that it’s thriving.

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Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship from Estonia: Lauri Kinkar, CEO of Messente (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Estonia has made huge progress in building a startup ecosystem. Can you talk a little bit about what has enabled that? What are the highlights of the ecosystem?

Lauri Kinkar: We have to take a few steps back. Back when Estonia regained its independence in the early 90’s, it was a unique situation. It’s a very tiny country trying to figure out how it should evolve.

Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship from Estonia: Lauri Kinkar, CEO of Messente (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much maturity do you want the project to reach? What is the benchmark that you use before you spin something out?

Lauri Kinkar: When the first few enterprise customers with a prominent track record are ready, provided that we understand the reasons why they are ready to pay for that solution and we have a pretty good idea from them what the pain point that this solution is solving for them.

Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship from Estonia: Lauri Kinkar, CEO of Messente (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the process? Do you identify one problem to work on and then go find a customer with whom to start developing the solution?

Lauri Kinkar: We’ve always believed that what you just described is the ideal scenario. If you always ask potential customers what they need, they probably would not come up with that kind of innovation.

Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship from Estonia: Lauri Kinkar, CEO of Messente (Part 2)

Lauri Kinkar: Back in 2001, we founded Mobi with a group of other people who were university students at that time. It was a telecommunication company. Over time, we started to go into new areas, services, and new platforms.