Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did this idea come from?

Mikel Lindsaar: From the services business. reinteractive does a lot of customer applications connected to Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: Are all your product ideas from your services business?

Mikel Lindsaar: MetaPulse was something that I always wanted to build. I created my services business so I can create MetaPulse. StoreConnect came out of reinteractive.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though you had co-founders, there was no outside money.

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes, everything was bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about four SaaS apps now. Three of them you exited, and one is still running.

Best of Bootstrapping: The Journey Through Failure to Success

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

Entrepreneurs love to discuss success. Few are willing to discuss what they tried and failed at. When we spoke in 2019, Robly Co-founder Adam Robinson did a terrific job of sharing his journey through various failed experiments to a model that was gaining traction.

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?

Adam Robinson: I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I went to Rice University. I graduated in 2003. One of my friends had an internship at Goldman-Sachs the year before.

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Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was reinteractive?

Mikel Lindsaar: reinteractive is a consulting business. We do software development. I really wanted to build a SaaS business, but I didn’t have the resources or the people to start it. I didn’t have any way to get funding at that point.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing – starting with a consulting company – is a very common way. We have a whole track in One Million by One Million that we call Bootstrapping Using Services.

Best of Bootstrapping: Capital Efficient Entrepreneurs Turned $1M into $80M

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

Motili CEO Jeff Wilkins and his co-founder had turned $1 million of personal investment into $80 million in revenue. Pretty capital-efficient, this entrepreneur’s journey! Motili was acquired by Daikin/Goodman in 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with where your story begins. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeff Wilkins: I grew on the East Coast. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington DC, and moved around a lot as a kid. I spend time in Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.

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Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 1)

Mikel has built a services company in Australia and spawned six SaaS products out of it. One of them, StoreConnect, is a terrific Bootstrapping by Piggybacking story on top of Salesforce.com. He has exited four of the apps and expects to grow StoreConnect to $100M+ in revenue.

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?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later and Build a World-Class AI Startup from India: Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is your relationship with companies like Zendesk and Freshworks?

Raghu Ravinutala: I call it frenemies. We integrate with Zendesk. Any transfer is handled by Zendesk. We have a lot of cases where we have replaced Zendesk as well. In some cases, we do compete with handling the same budget out there. The biggest thing I talk about is Salesforce as an investor in the company.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later and Build a World-Class AI Startup from India: Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How developed are your system-integrated channels? The kinds of things that you’re talking of doing, this is the kind of thing system integrators do well, right? You have talked about customer support use cases. You talked about IT support use cases and HR support. If you went into an enterprise, you could do millions of dollars of business in each enterprise. Are you penetrated into that channel?

Raghu Ravinutala: Yes, I talked about Roche Pharma. That’s a joint win with Accenture. It’s deployed by Accenture. We have deals with Infosys. India’s largest government implementation, which is for India’s income tax, runs automated servicing for their customers and is completely handled and deployed by Infosys on top of our platform.