Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I know quite a bit about that kind of work because I did a lead generation software company earlier in my career that required lots of scraping and cleaning. It’s quite complicated and it’s very domain-specific. I am very aware of how very complicated this is. Did you launch this with any financing or was it a bootstrapped launch?

Shane Evans: It was a bootstrapped launch. I brought Mydeco as an early customer, and that really helped. It wasn’t too difficult to bring in one or two other customers. We took a very small amount of funding from a friend in Ireland to pay salaries. It was a very small amount.

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this in London or Ireland?

Shane Evans: My co-founder is from Montevideo, Uruguay. I went there for the winter. Then I came back to Ireland. I’ve been in Ireland since then. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next move?

Shane Evans: Let me give a background about what happened at Mydeco so the next move will make a lot more sense. As part of the platform we were trying to build, there was a big e-commerce part. Part of that e-commerce component was we needed some data from other websites. We had some affiliate relationship but that data was not available in the format that we could easily import. This led me to write a web scraping program.

I looked but I couldn’t find something that would actually work well for us, so I wrote my own framework. We worked with some outsourcing companies including one company in Norway. That company was founded by my current business partner. We worked together in Mydeco on this web scraping system. We open-sourced that. That had actually become quite popular by the time I wanted to wind down at Mydeco. There were a lot of people with the same problem. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the story?

Shane Evans: I was quite enjoying my time there. It turned into more of a big company. Once again, I found myself yearning for something that was a little bit different. I think it was late 2004 when I quit. During my time there, I had focused on some difficult technical challenging tasks that I was interested in. There were some constraints around having a lot of traffic on the website.

I started doing some consulting work with some of my friends. These are two friends who are really good engineers. We focused on challenges with scaling. We started working on what would now be called Big Data or data science. At that time, it didn’t have a name. It was also interesting for me that we had some initial contracts in London. After maybe half a year, we started getting work outside of London. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 1)

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Shane has built a 140-people virtual team-based business from Ireland. Very interesting view into a different part of the world.

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?

Shane Evans: I was actually born in the UK. Both of my parents worked at Heathrow. My father is British but my mother was Irish. I think their involvement and love for travel had an impact on me. I came to Ireland when I was two years old and that’s where I grew up.

Sramana Mitra: What was your educational process like? >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like at this point, you have decided on the positioning and the target market. You started generating revenue. You hit the million dollar mark. What’s the next major inflection point?

Mikko Valimaki: One important point in the early days was, we were also talking with venture capital. When we got the first few six-figure deals, we were lucky enough that we didn’t raise money. By 2011, we decided that we don’t need additional funds as we were growing on our sales. That was one of the important things that we figured early on. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You basically were putting embedded code on the devices for filesystem management.

Mikko Valimaki: Yes. Looking back, I think we made the right choice. We were able to grow really fast in the selected Asian market. When we were in the open source stage, I would say that from the early revenue, it looked like North America was the biggest one. Then there was significant revenue from Central Europe, and Asia was minor. When we went into the licensing business and figured out that the device market is the best for us, then Asia was really the way to go. Starting in 2010, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese started to handle the customer relations and develop the market further.

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe did you figure out that this was going to be your core strategy? Do you remember exactly when you came to that conclusion?

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you highlight what was different in the commercial product versus the open source product? From a product positioning point of view, why would somebody who was interested in the open source product buy this one?

Mikko Valimaki: I would say there are three reasons. Some of our biggest customers were very hesitant to use open source. When we said that this software is no longer open source, there was more demand for it from big companies who didn’t actually want to share all the source code of their own product. We didn’t know about this kind of stuff. Then of course, we started to develop all the new features. It was technically much better. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were they willing to pay if you had a good website and if you had a company?

Mikko Valimaki: We were able to get some of our very first money just by basically consulting and helping some of the first commercial users. For that, we improved the website a little bit. We tried to make it look like it was a company.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very different question. There are certain things that customers are willing to pay for and certain things that customers are not willing to pay for. The question I’m asking you is were you able to pick up that these customers were willing to pay if you were set up to look and act professional like a real business. >>>