Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 2)

Tyler Eyamie: I had an entrepreneurial hunger to go out and try to build a business on my own. One of the things that I had as an advantage over most entrepreneurs was that I could potentially go for several years with no salary.

The other thing that I had was access to tremendous talented people who had helped Protus grow and get acquired. They were also trying to figure out what to do next. I had years of trust and experience working with these people.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 1)

Wonderful story of a SaaS company that has invested $10M to get to $10M ARR over 9 years. Lots of options ahead to exit profitably or to keep going.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big were they?

Diego Gomes: They were around $10 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: What level were you at last year?

Diego Gomes: Around $12 million. 

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why did Matt join your company?

Diego Gomes: We were growing and delivering good results with marketing our products. Our product was evolving and was generating leads, but we were struggling with learning sales. Our founders and the whole team was not familiar in that area.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The first year revenue was $800,000, and then how did that grow?

Diego Gomes: It started at $800,000, then it grew to $1.3 million to $2 million to $8 million. I would say between the year we grew our revenues from $2 million to $8 million was when we accelerated the most. We also started targeting outside of Brazil at that time. 

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your first client that was in the model that you found to be a possible success model. Who was that client? What were the circumstances? What did you do for that client? How did you get to the product-market fit?

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you launch as a software company or as a marketplace? 

Diego Gomes: I launched it as a software company. The first year was very challenging. Although we were having a little bit of success in selling to customers, the problem was that they were buying a content marketing platform, but they weren’t creating enough content.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 1)

Diego has built a terrific content marketing company from Brazil. He bootstrapped first, raised money later, and has recently acquired a sizable US company to scale. Excellent story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Tell me about your background. Where are you from? Where were you raised?