Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People were finding this product online? What was the customer acquisition strategy?

Mikita Mikado: It was all online. It was SEO-driven. It was pretty much a zero sales effort. It was self-service.

Sramana Mitra: What was the price point?

Mikita Mikado: $10 a month.

Sramana Mitra: At $10 a user, that’s a lot of users. >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You got the business going while you were in Hawaii – the business that you are running now?

Mikita Mikado: Somewhat. I tend to believe that what we have now is a consequence of what happened back then. I’ve been running a web design agency. That agency got me and my co-founder to build an extension for a web content management system.

That made us a little bit of money, so we built hundreds of those extensions. We scaled that business to about 100 employees. We’ve been doing web content management for quite a while. Web content management led us to start a business around web >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 1)

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

As you know, I love stories of entrepreneurs in different parts of the world finding success through grit and creativity. Mikita’s story gives us an insight into what’s happening in Belarus, and how he has navigated his way to Silicon Valley. And our Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later mantra holds!

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

Mikita Mikado: I’m from Belarus, which is a small, former Soviet Union state on the western border of Russia. I was born in >>>

Bootstrapping from Finland: Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in all?

Mikko Honkanen: A little bit more than 1,200 customers.

Sramana Mitra: What has been your experience with the US? Three markets are Scandinavian markets where the policy is open data. Is the Dutch market open data as well?

Mikko Honkanen: There’s actually a site called Global Open Data Index. You can compare different countries. All these >>>

Bootstrapping from Finland: Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the product that had to be localized?

Mikko Honkanen: Yes. We had to localize the product. All the Nordic countries are pretty good with open data. We were able to buy and open the basic data. We had to add lots of local data sources and translate the UI and make sure that we customize the workflow for Swedish users.

Also in 2015, we decided to have a customer success department. We found a fantastic person who is now our Customer Success Director. She took over most of the existing customers to make sure that every single one of them is happy and they want to renew the contract. It was also in September when we brought in a person for content marketing. Starting in Q3, we started building those >>>

Bootstrapping from Finland: Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You had a bunch of paying customers before building the product. How much were they paying for the annual upfront payment? How did you find these companies?

Mikko Honkanen: We used our own product. To find the first unaffiliated customer, you need to do sales and marketing. So, we focused on all the companies that bring in lots of sales people. If a company has a lot of job openings in the field of sales, that was a sign for us that they invest in sales. Typically sales people needed to do prospecting, so we went after those companies.

We also started content marketing early on. We were writing on a blog once a week and asked our network to share that. We got >>>

Bootstrapping from Finland: Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to zero in on exactly that. I’ll give you some context. My second company was a lead generation and web research company, exactly solving the same problem, except that it was very early and the web didn’t have anywhere near the level of data that it has today. I’m talking end of 1997 through 1999. The web was much shallower.

I know a lot about your space. There were other companies that tried to do that. InsideView was one of the significant ones. We had done artificial intelligence-driven architecture, but because of the lack of data, it didn’t quite have the level of capabilities. When you say you did one or two things that you did really well, what were those things that you zeroed in on that allowed you to get advance payment?

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Bootstrapping from Finland: Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen (Part 1)

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

Mikko has steadily built an excellent SaaS company from Finland and is now expanding into the US as well. Read on for more.

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

Mikko Honkanen: I was born in a small town in Finland 20 miles up north from Helsinki. I studied at Helsinki School of Economics. I also studied at Oxford. Then I spent the last 10 years in the SaaS business. I spent almost seven years at a Norwegian company called Meltwater. >>>