Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Marnix Broer: This was in 2014. That was the moment we tried to see if we can go abroad. At that moment, we had two challenges. One was, can we make a business out of this? The main goal is to help students all over the world. As a company, you have to be healthy to survive. We needed a business model.

We’d launched in all universities in the Netherlands. Now we had to broaden our audience and expand our market. We did that. We implemented a premium system. That’s where the business model came in.

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.

Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you build the platform yourself?

Marnix Broer: Yes. I started with Jacques. He was my roommate in the student house. Soon we needed someone to build the website. That’s when I knocked on the door of my old friend from high school who was also studying in Delft.

Later on, we saw that he was great at that. He also had a friend helping him out. They joined us. That’s how we bootstrapped the first website. As soon as we had the first documents up, it went like wildfire. Everybody started using it in just a couple of weeks. Then we got requests from students in other cities. They gave their documents. We put them online.

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?

Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 1)

We’ve done a lot of EdTech case studies and also a lot of 2-sided Marketplace Case Studies.
Here’s one from The Netherlands that compares/competes with Course Hero and Quizlet. Terrific 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?

From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you just do more of the same for the next few years?

Jordan Boesch: Yes. There were some interesting moments. We hit about 30 people. You start to feel these inflection points where things start to get rocky. It’s a lack of process for things. As a startup, you thrive off of not having processes.

As we grew, I could feel that starting to happen at 30 people. We brought in a consultant to help us in putting in some lightweight frameworks to help guide the business. That was helpful for us. When we hit 50 people, we had almost a full-time facilitator that was part of our team that was doing planning with us and helping with some lightweight frameworks.

From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of marketing and customer acquisition, was Google search still yielding for you?

Jordan Boesch: Yes. If you searched for something as basic as restaurant scheduling software, there’d be no organic relevant results. We thought this was a great opportunity to build content around these keywords. We didn’t have a ton of money to spend on Adwords. We were very careful about that.

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.