Bootstrapping by Piggybacking from Romania: 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the product that you got together?

Florin Cornianu: It was a very small script that allowed you to build a contact form and put it on your website. Back then, there wasn’t any Google Forms.

We thought about automating the creation of contact forms. It turned out to be a product. Instead of selling the script, we decided to sell it as a subscription. We did it on a freemium model.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking from Romania: 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu (Part 1)

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

You may have been reading our PaaS coverage, as well as Bootstrapping by Piggybacking posts.

Well, Florin has built a $6M SaaS business using this methodology with just $1M in funding. What’s more, he has done it entirely from Romania and sells to largely a US customer base.

Excellent story!

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If I were you, I’d take more of that responsibility on the fact that you didn’t necessarily know how to explain it to investors. If you did, this is not so difficult to understand.

Andrew Plato: I suppose. It is true that it took a lot of iterations to figure out how to describe the platform. The message there is that it’s the context problem. When you don’t have good context, you really need to be able to tell the story and you’ve to think about how the story will be heard and not how the story is being told.

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have about 50 customers right now?

Andrew Plato: That sounds right. We’ve got a mixture of some on our platform. It’s not quite 50. It’s probably in the low 20’s. We’d 12 on the platform as of this year. Plus some existing business.

Sramana Mitra: These 20 odd customers have all come out of your referral network?

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about your go-to market experience. Were the first people you went out to people that you had been selling your professional services to?

Andrew Plato: It’s a combination. We went to some of our existing customers first. Many of them struggled to even comprehend what we were doing. A recurring theme in my whole career is this context problem. You’re talking to a person in this particular context, and when you give them a completely different context, you create confusion.

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Which segment of the customer base did you go out to sell it to?

Andrew Plato: One of the things we learned very early on is that our product is very appealing at the enterprise SaaS level. Admittedly, it wasn’t what I originally thought. I thought we were going to be more mid-market. As soon as we hit the market, we resonated the most at the enterprise level, particularly, enterprise SaaS. 

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 3)

Andrew Plato: I kept noticing that these companies kept tripping over integrating multiple components. Everything was custom. They can never turn it into a full-on platform. There were technical problems. AWS was stymied by this to some extent as well. They couldn’t quite pull it all together.

From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing service contracts basically?

Andrew Plato: Yes. I did technical writing. I did a little bit of software development and website design. In 1999, I switched my company and became a security service provider. I was reselling other people’s security tech.