Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is it about this company that appealed to you and what is your background?

Rudy Nadilo: My background is in technology. To keep it simple, I graduated from Northwestern and got my MBA. I ended up being in the advertising industry for the first 10 years. Then I went to the research field because there was a firm called Information Resources, which had this amazing technology called Behaviour Scan. I just thought about this.

I remember sitting with a client and looking at these people come in presenting these electronic test markets and quantifying. You’d write an opinion paper and everybody was talking about it. Here was people coming in with facts. We were able to, electronically, send and read what people are buying in the supermarket based upon their scanner purchases and beam a television ad to one house versus another house. Being a geek, I love that. I worked for IRI for 10 years running their consumer panel and ended up being their Chief Marketing Officer. There was a lot of manual things being done. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about you and how this came about. You’re saying that you experienced demand from different countries for CRM. This was 2003?

Katherine Kostereva: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground?

Katherine Kostereva: It was just the two of us – myself and my partner. We bootstrapped the company. Especially in Ukraine, there were no venture capitalists. This industry just didn’t exist in Eastern Europe. Almost everyone was bootstrapping. Today, the company has 700 people on board. The question is how we grew from two founders to 700 people on board today. My friend was a developer. I left my job. He started to develop the product. I did the rest. >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 1)

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

Affiliate Marketing is at the heart of many wonderful bootstrapping stories. It’s inexpensive to get going and profitable quickly, and managed well, can scale substantially.

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?

Stephan Goss: I was born in Switzerland pretty close to Zurich. I came to the US in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do your education in Switzerland? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Were all the hundred customers, most of whom you transitioned into the new common platform, in Sweden? What was the geographical distribution of these clients? It sounds like you really remained close to them throughout this process.

Tobi Andersson: I’d like to make one correction. The number of customers were about 30 and they were all in Sweden.

Sramana Mitra: Geographically, it was a manageable thing to do for you to personally visit these customers.

Tobi Andersson: Yes. Nowadays with modern technology, everyone can achieve this even if you have customers around the globe. Another advice I have here is when you’re dealing with customers, turn on the video so that they can see you. They should be able to see your face and your body language. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 1)

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

This is a fascinating story of a Ukrainian entrepreneur bootstrapping her CRM Software company to global scale. We’re thrilled to bring you Katherine Kostereva’s inspiring and super intelligent entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get going. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Let’s go to the very beginning of your personal journey.

Katherine Kostereva: I was born in Ukraine. Since childhood, I’ve been traveling a lot and visited many countries worldwide. I graduated in 1999 with a Bachelors in Computer Science. Shortly after that, I got my MBA. Even from high school, I was obsessed with technology. I was thinking of the ways to transform business through technology. Technology has always attracted me. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 4)

Tobi Andersson: I spent many hours meeting customers telling them about my efforts. We were able to launch our platform which was called Dapresy Pro. That is the platform that we are offering to the market today. The first version of Dapresy Pro was made to address each customer’s needs.

I told them, “I’m going to ask you to stop using this customized solution from us and I need you to transition to this new software. There is no middle ground here. We need to stop working with the customized solutions.” I didn’t have the money to keep the generic platform and, at the same time, maintain these unique platforms. This was the tough part in my life because I basically spend my days on the phone getting complaints from customers. I >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What changes did you make? How did you move to the next phase of the journey?

Tobi Andersson: I decided two things. One is that I’m going to be an international company, which means I should have an offering that can help grow the company outside Sweden. Sweden is a great market. It’s an early adopter market, but it’s a small market. I decided that I had to create a foundation here in terms of our offering.

I also needed to create a scalable company without adding lots of people. I decided that I was going to create a foundation to scale revenue faster than fixed cost. Today, a lot of companies bring in external capital very early and use this capital to burn money and to create something that is not fully meeting the market demand. I >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary. What was your next step to go in that direction? Did you write a software? Did you use other people’s technology and showed them how to use it?

Tobi Andersson: This is also the next lesson here in becoming an entrepreneur. I realized that there is a need in the market for doing this. What I’d like to share with everybody is the best way to be successful is to stay close to the market. Ask them what they need but also be very sober about it. Sometimes the market doesn’t fully understand what they need because they don’t know what can be done. I talked to the customers and then I added my own vision about that. I started to visualize the data.

Initially, I purchased off-the-shelf software. I purchased well-known products like BI tools and reporting tools. I tried to visualize this market research data with off-the-shelf tools. I spent, more or less, three years doing this. Looking back, it was a time when I learned a lot. I went to customers. I asked them, >>>