Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The reality is that you were in revenue when you went out to raise. That makes things a lot simpler. The fact that you spent a year fine-tuning your model to the point where you were a recurring revenue-generating business makes raising money a lot simpler.

Braydan Young: The one thing going against us was that we were both salespeople. A lot of the questions were about our technical co-founder.

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: For Educators

For educators and people who want to build thriving communities of entrepreneurs, we have designed a couple of courses that give a roadmap.

Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: To me, calling sounds like a mistake.

Braydan Young: Yes. It would have been way better to have a marketing campaign or have a landing page. The knowledge I had was only coming from sales back then. It was brute force.

Sramana Mitra: Unless there is a substantial deal size of at least $10,000 or so, calling doesn’t really work.

Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You built something good enough for an MVP.

Braydan Young: Yes. We ended up creating a whole entity out in Pakistan. Business model was a buck a send. It started to take off. We were pretty good at SEO and if you search “send a coffee”, we’d pop up first. We got a letter saying, “Why is our logo all over your website?” They didn’t want resellers. We made a couple of quick bucks, so we packed it in.

Non-Technical Founders Building a Venture Scale SaaS Company: Sendoso CEO Braydan Young (Part 1)

Braydan and his cofounder are sales guys who have bootstrapped Sendoso to revenue and then raised over $150 million in VC money to scale an excellent SaaS company. Braydan discusses some of the mistakes and challenges, as well as their many successes.

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?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 4)

Vladimir Gendelman: We also included a lifetime warranty. We are the only printing company that offers that. The standard is your order, you get it, and then you have 7 to 10 days to inspect it. If there’s a problem, you can contact the printer, and they’ll take care of it.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you recover from that situation where you lost traffic? How did you come back from that?

Vladimir Gendelman: We also got hit at the beginning of all those penalties. There wasn’t much information out there. We hired a company. It was a digital marketing company that had some knowledge of this. They gave us ideas on what to do.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you offering people to buy?

Vladimir Gendelman: I started selling online right away. The very first version of the website was very basic. I just came up with a whole bunch of folders styles. I put them on a website. There weren’t that many. I started promoting.

Sramana Mitra: How did you promote it?