Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Unless you go to an elite school or are plugged into an environment, you don’t really have access. With what we do, everybody has access anywhere in the world. Give us an anchor point from a chronology point of view.

John Pope: I started those two businesses in 2004 and 2006 right after I left school. The context was I had bootstrapped these two small businesses. I didn’t have any money to start out with. I was living in a very small apartment with my wife. We kept all personal expenses to a minimum. We made ends meet and no more than that. Everything else was reinvested back into the business. >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

John and Jive have executed steadily over the last decade and have built a kick-ass company. Read on!

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?

John Pope: That’s a good place to start because where we come from, how we’re raised, and the early environment really shapes the way that we look at things and determines what type of an entrepreneur we’re going to be. I am from the Tacoma, Washington area. My family moved around a bit. I was the oldest child. >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s my question. What was the monthly recurring revenue when you raised the money?

Mikita Mikado: When we raised $600,000, we were around $30,000 monthly recurring revenue.

Sramana Mitra: This was for the new product?

Mikita Mikado: It was for the old product, but I was selling a division of the new product.

Sramana Mitra: They thought that you would be able to switch the clients over to the new product. That was the thought process of the angels? >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the scope of what you’re talking about overlaps with all sorts of existing products like DocuSign or EcoSign. How do you position in this general ecosystem?

Mikita Mikado: I find that the space is quite similar to the CRM space. There were lead management products and sales compensation products. There were a lot of pieces till Salesforce emerged. What we’re looking to do is a commerce platform for businesses to transact deals.

Signatures is part of our product. It’s a really nice feature. People get a lot of value by using electronic signatures, but it’s not what >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the spec that you came up with for PandaDoc?

Mikita Mikado: It’s a commerce platform. That’s what we wanted to do. We were building a B2B commerce platform – a place where companies make offers, send them to buyers, and collaborate on those, agree on terms, execute on terms, sign, and then transact large sums of money. By large sums of money, I mean anything that needs paperwork. If you think about it, the bulk of the world’s economy is still run by paper. That’s the type of deals we want to digitalize and move to the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a two-sided marketplace. Who were the early adopters of this? You said you

>>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People were finding this product online? What was the customer acquisition strategy?

Mikita Mikado: It was all online. It was SEO-driven. It was pretty much a zero sales effort. It was self-service.

Sramana Mitra: What was the price point?

Mikita Mikado: $10 a month.

Sramana Mitra: At $10 a user, that’s a lot of users. >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You got the business going while you were in Hawaii – the business that you are running now?

Mikita Mikado: Somewhat. I tend to believe that what we have now is a consequence of what happened back then. I’ve been running a web design agency. That agency got me and my co-founder to build an extension for a web content management system.

That made us a little bit of money, so we built hundreds of those extensions. We scaled that business to about 100 employees. We’ve been doing web content management for quite a while. Web content management led us to start a business around web >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

As you know, I love stories of entrepreneurs in different parts of the world finding success through grit and creativity. Mikita’s story gives us an insight into what’s happening in Belarus, and how he has navigated his way to Silicon Valley. And our Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later mantra holds!

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?

Mikita Mikado: I’m from Belarus, which is a small, former Soviet Union state on the western border of Russia. I was born in >>>