568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn (Part 1)

Abinash Saikia, Co-founder of EnCloudEn and former 1Mby1M Premium member, has successfully bootstrapped his venture to an exit and discusses the process in great depth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the premise of EnCloudEn.

Abinash Saikia: I have had a pretty good education from IIT Chennai and, subsequently, an MBA from IIM Bangalore. I worked for a couple of years but the entrepreneurial bug was always there. I could not continue for much longer. I left my job and started a company called SmartBuildings. I was at that company for about three years. It was mostly an IoT-based energy conservation solution.

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the customer acquisition strategy. Beyond the partnerships through which you got to the first base, what did you do from a sales and marketing point of view that got you to the next level?

Joris Kroese: There are different phases there, but we started simply by appointing people who would use their own outreach techniques to prospect potential buyers. It was mainly one-on-one and not so much marketing yet.

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Business model is SaaS?

Joris Kroese: It’s SaaS. Our clients are the brands where we basically add these e-commerce capabilities on a fixed fee per month per country.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your primary channel was tagging along with the sales team of this content syndication company. Was that the only channel?

Joris Kroese: Initially yes.

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do the IT services work?

Joris Kroese: For a year and a half, after which, I sold the company. I actually had a new business idea in my mind while I was still running the e-commerce business. We did a lot of turnovers. We were a much-appreciated business partner for business brands. All those brands, back then, had a dealer locator.

Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 1)

Often niche ideas are great to build capital-efficient, profitable startups 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?

Joris Kroese: I was born in a small village close to Amsterdam. I was born in 1977. I studied Information Engineering. After my studies, I started my first venture which was an e-commerce venture selling, mainly, consumer electronics in Benelux and Spain. I did that for about 10 years.

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a tool that I use when we teach our entrepreneurs about building a sales funnel. We call it pain extraction questions. When you start discussions, you ask questions about a pain. What is your first pain extraction question?

Mahendra Alladi: How often do you get bit by a production bug? How many escalations do you take because of delayed release cycles? The answers are also very common. This is something that is a burning issue. I don’t really have to sell a lot. The problem is easily acknowledged.

Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you need equity financing or were you doing it completely on the basis of that seed round and these lending facilities?

Brent Jackson: In between, we did do another seed round for $2.4 million in equity fund.

Sramana Mitra: This was from a VC?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you primarily go after the large enterprises?

Mahendra Alladi: Of late, we focus more on the large enterprises, but it’s a mix.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to a million-dollar ARR?

Mahendra Alladi: Within the first year.

Sramana Mitra: You continue to bootstrap?