Best of Bootstrapping: Tremend CEO Marius Hanganu Bootstraps from Romania

Tremend CEO Marius Hanganu has built a services company from Romania to over $5 million in revenue. Now, he is trying to bootstrap a product using the services 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?

Marius Hanganu: I’m from Romania. I was born near the seaside. At an early age, we moved to the capital city of Bucharest. My father is an Admiral in the Navy. A bit of that made a mark on myself. I got into computers around 12. I got into the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in the Computer Science Department. It’s probably the best in the country.

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Best of Bootstrapping: BioConnect CEO Bootstraps with Sophisticated Strategic Maneuvering

BioConnect CEO Rob Douglas has built a thriving founder-financed business from Toronto using very sophisticated strategic maneuvering. I just loved discussing the strategic nuances of this business. You’ll learn a LOT from reading this 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?

Rob Douglas: I’m a Canadian. I was born just outside of Toronto. I have grown up in and around the city of Toronto. I’m married. I have two kids. Both of them are in their 20’s. I have spent most of my entrepreneurial life primarily focused on markets outside of Canada. US and EMEA have been primary markets over my career.

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Best of Bootstrapping: The VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance

The compensation disbalance in the Venture Capital / Private Equity world remains quite stark. Take a look at the chart a friend once sent me showing some concrete data on VC compensation, and Private Equity industry performance.

VCs without much of an operating background constitute a trigger-happy lot, operating based on spreadsheets rather than experience or intuition. Of course there are exceptions, and VCs like John Doerr and Mike Moritz have created enormous value, and have effectively helped build the ecosystem as we know it today. Nonetheless, the few rounds of Silicon Valley Gold Rushes have made it possible for opportunists who have also managed to flourish.

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Best of Bootstrapping: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo Bootstrapped to Exit with Sage

CEO Mitch Russo tells the story of how he built TimeSlips and sold it to Sage. Very entertaining as well as instructive.

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?

Mitch Russo: I was born in New York. I was raised in a small community called Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. It was there that we basically started a rock band. Using the idea of how to build an entertainment platform as a rock band in high school, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and I learned a lot about what it takes to make money and how to promote and share content.

I later used all of those skills to start a software company in 1985 with a partner. We grew that from a $5,000 investment to over $10 million in revenue and 100 employees. We sold the company to Sage PLC in the UK.

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Best of Bootstrapping: How FormAssembly CEO Bootstrapped a Virtual Company with a Paycheck

Cedric’s story is a textbook case study of the kind of entrepreneur we want to see emerge and grow in every corner of the world: a solo entrepreneur who is a developer and a product guy capable of getting to validation while holding onto a day job. Today, FormAssembly CEO Cedric Savarese has almost 50 employees spread around the world, and while it maintains a small office of fewer than 10 people in Indiana, the bulk of the company has scaled as a virtual workforce. Excellent model, and I encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to read this carefully.

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?

Cedric Savarese: I was born in France and expatriated to the US. I grew up in a small town not so far from Paris.

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck to YCombinator and $10M Series A: Ryan Chan, CEO of UpKeep (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you do in 2016, 2017, and 2018? What was the ramp in terms of free users and paying users? What was happening?

Ryan Chan: We’ve been growing very fast. We’ve hit a true nerve in this market and the completely underserved industry. Over 2,500 paying companies use UpKeep. Each company could have anywhere from a single user to several hundred users in their UpKeep account. Again, we literally had zero about three years ago, which is nuts.

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck to YCombinator and $10M Series A: Ryan Chan, CEO of UpKeep (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have $10 million in the bank. You started hiring sales people and started putting a process together.

Now, let me reask the question. What was the repeatable sales process?Was it that you started putting in a process to take all the leads? Are the free users categorized by companies, company size, and so forth and started having people call those companies?

Ryan Chan: I’ll tell you our story. I think every story is different. So we have always been 100% inbound. We’ve got a freemium product, basically meaning that people can sign up for the app, download it, and use it for free forever.

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck to YCombinator and $10M Series A: Ryan Chan, CEO of UpKeep (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Kevin was also doing YCombinator?

Ryan Chan: I was part of the YCombinator class of winter ’17.

Sramana Mitra: But you didn’t hire him through YCombinator. You hired him and brought him into your YCombinator membership.

Ryan Chan: Right. We went through YCombinator. It was an amazing experience. I got introduced to this world of technology, venture capital, growth, and startups.