Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the VMWare Marketplace. How many VMWare admins are on the marketplace?

Stan Markov: It’s not the biggest source of leads. If I compare it to the AWS Marketplace or the Azure marketplace, VMWare Marketplace is not as popular. It’s one of the ways to get to either VMWare or third-party products.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They invested because the five of you had deep domain knowledge. This is a very desirable team.

Stan Markov: In addition to that, we had all the certificates. I was the first one in the entire IBM to get the highest VMWare certificate – VMWare Certified Design Expert. Only around 300 in the world have it.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is Runecast positioned? What is the go-to-market?

Stan Markov: We started developing the MVP in 2014. We launched at VMWorld in San Francisco in 2015. At that time, our product was oriented towards VMWare vSpheres. It was proactive troubleshooting but also security hardening. It was a lot on the IT operations and configuration management side.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 1)

Stan and his four co-founders have built a wonderful business from Brno in the Czech Republic. A lot of Bootstrapping by Piggybacking principles have been applied to gain leverage.

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

Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was it just you and your Ukrainian developers at this point?

Nikita Sherbina: No. One was a developer and the other was a designer. I’m the Product Sanager, Sales. One guy was building it. Another guy was designing it. I was trying to build a sales team and thinking about different features. If you have a couple of people, you can do a lot. I don’t think you even need a good developer. You need to solve before you build.

Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get your first customer? It sounds like you had a personal experience as well as observed experience of identifying the problem. How did you get to the first customer?

Nikita Sherbina: We outsource sales people and back in my country, we educate them. We educate those sales reps how to gather emails from LinkedIn. You go to Google Maps. You search 100 different locations with restaurants. You schedule those with your offer. You get a response.

Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra:: Talk about the two projects.

Nikita Sherbina: I was working in an AI-enabled tool company. It was for marketing and sales people. It helped communication between departments. For example, you can create multiple campaigns in sales. Marketing people can see all these statistics. We’ve 80 customers which generated $80 million of revenue. It was a B2B SaaS business. We were providing a software platform.

Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR: Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen (Part 1)

This is a classic bootstrapping story with a very small team to serious revenue.

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?

Nikita Sherbina: I was born and raised in Ukraine. I moved to the United States about six years ago without knowing anything about this land.