Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this happening?

Mikko Valimaki: This happened in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: The first order of business was to get an open source product going right?

Mikko Valimaki: We thought this whole thing through and we figured out that it cannot be a big enough business for us to grow this company really big. One of the first things we did was figuring out a company name. This current name Tuxera was launched in 2009. At the same time, we did two other things. After spending several months with Microsoft, we finally made this background IP license with Microsoft so that we could legally develop Microsoft filesystems. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 1)

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

In our effort to bring you stories from the global startup ecosystem, here we introduce you to a wonderful success story from Finland.

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 circumstances?

Mikko Valimaki: I’m a 39-year-old guy from Finland. I did my schooling in Finland. I did, however, study in Berkeley in the United States and was exposed to the American culture. I’ve never worked for any big company. I always started my own stuff. I had already developed my own computer games back in the 1990s while at high school. I tried to sell those.

After university, I tried to found my own company. I tried several things. We had one database startup back in 2001. The product is still selling but that broke up perhaps because of personal issues with the other founders. That was one of my first success stories. There were some other companies as >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about the New Zealand team?

Jason Westland: I still have them. They’re our development team. If you can imagine going back to 2014, it was just me and the development team. Now, I have a team of customer support and marketing people here in Austin. The development team in New Zealand has scaled.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of metrics? How many customers? Where you run rate wise?

Jason Westland: I believe we have 16,052 paying customers.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 5)

Jason Westland: We’ve been able to retain our vertical market there. Our nearest competitor is Clarizen. They have a Gantt. It’s technically just a read-only Gantt chart. It does work for small projects but the account size is very limited in Clarizen because of the inability to handle large volumes. The way I think about the competition in project management is that you have three levels with an emerging fourth. If you can imagine a triangle, at the bottom of the triangle is task management. You’re just managing a tasks list.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the 2012 to 2014 period, you were operating with a very healthy profit margin. How many people were in the company and how did it grow?

Jason Westland: That’s why it was so profitable. We had no marketing team at that time. It was just me. We had two full-time developers. We had one tester and one support person.

Sramana Mitra: It was a very lean organisation.

Jason Westland: That’s right. Prior to that, to build the product we needed a lotof contractors. The minute that we went live with the Gold version, we released all the contractors. We immediately became profitable. Then I paid off the debt. Once I paid off the debt, I reinvested the profit in growth.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of the growth strategies once you achieved that healthy mental peace state? >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you started the company at about 2008 around the financial crisis. It took you nine months to get the first product out. The first product didn’t work. Can you put this in a timeline on when the traction actually started?

Jason Westland: It actually started in January 2010. We had, what we called, our Gold release.

Sramana Mitra: How many customer did you have in 2010?

Jason Westland: I guess in December 2009, we had almost 100% churn rate and less than a hundred customers in the system. It didn’t grow for that first year and a half. >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about money? Hiring high-level people costs money.

Jason Westland: It does. I sold my first business. My second business was sold shortly after that. I invested all of the money from those two businesses. I then went and mortgaged the house. My mom mortgaged her house. I took out some credit card debt. It was really high-risk in those early days. I didn’t take on board any outside funding.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get a first version of the software out? >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 1)

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

I have always said that you need to bootstrap your way to validation and traction. Jason did just that, and has built a robust company from New Zealand. Read on, it’s a fabulous 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?

Jason Westland: That’s way back in time than I expected. I’m from New Zealand in the Southern Alps. My first job was managing a project of 25 people. I was 22 out of university. I was in project management until around 15 years ago when I became the General Manager of a software company that grew fast. I was inspired, based on reporting to a Board that I learned a lot from, to start my own business. This is the third business that I’ve started. >>>