Roundtable Recap: September 12 – Services Startups Offer Great Bootstrapping Platforms

During this week’s roundtable, we had a comprehensive discussion about a small services business that is already in revenue. Unlike many in the industry, I am a big fan of services businesses because they provide excellent bootstrapping capability. If you build a strong services business, you create for yourself options. You can use the services revenues and cashflow as a platform from which to build something more scalable with faster growth.

Seven Boats

Today, Debajyoti Banerjee from Kolkata, India, pitched Seven Boats, a digital marketing and training business that has customers, revenues, and profits. There are techniques that can be applied to this business to scale it faster, introduce productization principles, repeatability, etc. Very promising.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: Entrepreneur Couple Bootstraps to $10M from Colorado

Love and startups go hand in hand for AdCellerant Co-founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson, who are helping media companies generate seven-figure revenue streams.

Sramana Mitra: Whoever wants to start, 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?

Brock Berry: Thanks for having us. I’m the Founder and CEO of AdCellerant. I’m from Indiana where I grew up and spent the first 23 years of my life before I was compelled to move to Colorado where the weather is a little friendlier and there were a few more work opportunities.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Vainu Co-founder Mikko Honkanen Bootstraps from Finland

Mikko has steadily built an excellent SaaS company from Finland and is now expanding into the US as well. Read on for more.

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?

Mikko Honkanen: I was born in a small town in Finland, 20 miles up north from Helsinki. I studied at Helsinki School of Economics. I also studied at Oxford. Then I spent the last 10 years in the SaaS business. I spent almost seven years at a Norwegian company called Meltwater.

Sramana Mitra: I know Meltwater. I know the founders of Meltwater. They’re here in Silicon Valley.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Ownership Matters

For those of you rushing to raise venture capital with a deck of slides or a minimum viable product, let me offer you a challenge: How can you get to a $20 million pre-money valuation in Series A, raise $5 million, and keep control of 80% of the equity?

That’s what Christian Chabot, founder of Tableau Software, can teach you from his real-life experience. Chabot, needless to say, did so by bootstrapping the early stages of his company, validating the customer need, building a great product in the domain of analytics and visualization, and generating serious revenue and OEM partnerships before going out to raise any venture financing at all.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrap Linguamatics to Over $10M from the UK

Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, including Co-founder Roger Hale, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business.

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?

Roger Hale: I think I had quite a normal upbringing. I grew up in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. My mother came from a family with a local manufacturing business. She also ran a restaurant for a while. My father was an academic. He was a mathematician. He had actually been a code breaker and worked with some of the very first computers as part of that. I didn’t obviously know that until later.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Tuft & Needle CEO Bootstraps to Over $100 Million

Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture-scale growth without venture capital. Tuft & Needle CEO JT Marino shares his story.

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?

JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix, but I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to Penn State. That’s where I met my co-founder, Daehee Park. From there, my career took me to Silicon Valley working for several startups. That’s where my co-founder and I stuck together. We were at a company at Palo Alto and we decided that we wanted to build something of our own. Based on our previous experience with startups, we wanted to do it a different way.

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Best of Bootstrapping: SproutLoud CEO Bootstraps to $30 Million from Florida

Jared Shusterman bootstrapped his company with his bar mitzvah money. Read his wonderful story!

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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a concentration in Finance and Marketing. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an investment bank in the online media practice. That’s the quick summary of my initial upbringing.

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Roundtable Recap: July 25 – Deep Dive into FinTech Investing

During this week’s roundtable, we had Doug Atkin, Managing Partner at Communitas Capital Partners, as our guest. Doug has extensive experience in FinTech and this conversation explored the nuances of that sector.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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