Best of Bootstrapping: Seed Investors Who Like Bootstrapped Startups

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

I would like to encourage bootstrapping entrepreneurs to start thinking about certain investors as bootstrapping partners. These investors, typically, LIKE capital efficient businesses.

They do not want to force feed capital into companies, unlike certain larger funds.

Their fund sizes are small, and they are set up to make money off smaller exits. [Re: Bootstrapping to Exit]

Please listen to a few conversations to get a feel for the point of view. There are many more on the Seed Capital series on our blog. You can also listen to the 1Mby1M Podcasts for more.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Algo.ai with Services from Michigan

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

I am always thrilled to see great entrepreneurship in various parts of the world that are off-center. Well, Algo Founder and CEO Amjad Hussain’s journey is a great one from Detroit.

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?

Amjad Hussain: I was born in a very small village of Pakistan.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Under30Experiences to $5M

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

Under30Experiences Co-founder Matt Wilson has built a fantastic business using content marketing to sell travel experiences to a millennial demographic. Very cool! Here is our conversation from 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Matt Wilson: I grew up in upstate New York. I grew up in a little tiny town called Stormville, New York. It’s about 60 minutes outside of New York City. It’s not really that close to the city, but it wasn’t extremely rural. I just started being an enterprising young man whether it was by mowing lawns or picking golf balls out of the local ponds. Selling the golf balls on eBay was my first online business. That really ignited the passion for entrepreneurship. Baseball cards would probably be the other thing that I was really passionate about when I was younger.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped from Arizona to $10M

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

After putting the spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Arizona, I spoke with Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel. He shares another terrific story of bootstrapping success from Arizona.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Joshua Strebel: I was born in a little town in Idaho called Soda Springs. I’m the youngest of nine children. I grew up primarily in Las Vegas, Nevada and was splitting time within Salt Lake City, Utah. My parents were divorced when I was younger, so I went back and forth between households. I finished high school in Salt Lake City and ended up in Arizona where I went to college at Northern Arizona University.
Sramana Mitra: When was it that you came out of college?

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Unicorns

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

While it doesn’t happen that often, Bootstrapped Unicorns do exist.

My 2014 Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, has a whole section on this topic. You can read an excerpt on my blog titled Bootstrapped Unicorns. In this piece, I discuss three companies, Zoho, eClinicalWorks, and Veeam, that have bootstrapped to about a billion dollars in revenues.

Revenues NOT valuation.

That puts their valuations in the five to ten billion range or beyond. So they are Unicorns (billion dollar valuation) many times over.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Blitzscaling versus Bootstrapping

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

You must have read something or the other about Blitzscaling, the hypergrowth phenomenon that Reid Hoffman has been championing:

What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants?

The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion – as quickly as possible.

Well, I have a small fact to point out: it probably isn’t an option for you.

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568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn (Part 1)

Abinash Saikia, Co-founder of EnCloudEn and former 1Mby1M Premium member, has successfully bootstrapped his venture to an exit and discusses the process in great depth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the premise of EnCloudEn.

Abinash Saikia: I have had a pretty good education from IIT Chennai and, subsequently, an MBA from IIM Bangalore. I worked for a couple of years but the entrepreneurial bug was always there. I could not continue for much longer. I left my job and started a company called SmartBuildings. I was at that company for about three years. It was mostly an IoT-based energy conservation solution.

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the customer acquisition strategy. Beyond the partnerships through which you got to the first base, what did you do from a sales and marketing point of view that got you to the next level?

Joris Kroese: There are different phases there, but we started simply by appointing people who would use their own outreach techniques to prospect potential buyers. It was mainly one-on-one and not so much marketing yet.