Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later to $120M from Colorado: Madwire CEO JB Kellogg (Part 1)

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

This story discusses all sorts of interesting nuances, including DIFM vs. DIY. Read on.

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?

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking from Romania: 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business is coming from these app marketplaces?

Florin Cornianu: A big part right now depends on partners.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage?

Florin Cornianu: Half.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking from Romania: 123FormBuilder CEO Florin Cornianu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said it took you two years to get to $60,000 annual revenue. That’s 2010 then, right?

Florin Cornianu: It took us all the way to 2014 to get to a million dollars in revenue. 

Sramana Mitra: Besides Google SEO for customer acquisition, was there anything else that you did for customer acquisition?

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.