Bootstrapping Course: Welcome

Nowadays, startups can be built while a founder is still fully employed. Many entrepreneurs start as solo founders and achieve great progress until they need a team. Virtual teams are common these days and easily affordable.

At 1Mby1M, we support employed entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who are at the very beginning of their journeys. They might not even know what to build or how to build it.

We encourage entrepreneurs not to quit their day job until their business becomes fundable or sustainable. 

Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs get rejected by investors and accelerators every year. Y Combinator rejects over 95% of their applicants. Andreessen Horowitz rejects 99% of theirs. 

In this mind-boggling stream of rejections, there are numerous high potential companies that need to bootstrap their way to fundability or sustainability.

We accelerate their learning with the 1Mby1M Curriculum and over 1000 case studies of real-life success stories. 

We support their fund-raising efforts through personal introductions to investors.

If you enjoy this course, check out 1Mby1M Basic, our curriculum-only option.

If you’re trying to assess why you’re getting rejections, use the 1Mby1M Self-Assessment.

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Cleverbridge From Germany

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

We’re always impressed by entrepreneurs who manage to build sizeable companies without outside capital. Read how Founder Christian Blume maneuvered Cleverbridge to $40 million in revenue and did not want to deal with venture capital and private equity when we spoke in 2015. You can listen to our podcast interview here.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Christian Blume: I was born in Cologne, Germany. I moved over to the US when I was seven years old. I stayed for two years in Detroit. Then, I moved back to Germany again for a couple of years. When I was 15, I moved to London and did my International Baccalaureate over there. Then I moved back to Germany again and did my apprenticeship as a car mechanic. I then went to study Economics and went to an asset management company based out of Frankfurt, which was addressing high net worth individuals who needed investment opportunities. I was part of an advisory team there before I was tasked by my General Manager to move to the Internet in 1998. That was when everything got really important. Everybody tried to attach a .com to the ending of their company name and that made them an Internet company. I was asked to actually start a subsidiary focused on individuals who were looking at running their portfolio online and administrating it. This was when I actually got in touch with e-commerce with a company called Element Five, which was acquired in 2004 by Digital River out of the US. That gave us the opportunity to start Cleverbridge at that time.

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Brian Phillips, CEO of MedShift (Part 1)

Brian talks about IT in the medical aesthetics world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce MedShift and yourself to our audience. 

Brian Phillips: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of MedShift. We are a medical technology company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Video FAQs

As Expected, Pure Storage Leveraging Portworx Acquisition Successfully

According to a recent report, the global NAND flash memory market is estimated to grow from $46.62 billion in 2020 to $85.36 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of over 11%. Mountain View-based Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) recently reported its fourth quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 5)

Vasco Pedro: From a more NLP perspective, there are a lot of use cases inside the enterprise that need an AI-first approach. They are not so obvious, but they are the scaffolding that enables other stuff to work.

For example, evaluation of human translation. We have a state-of-the-art system in quality estimation that does look at the output of machine translation and then it makes a real-time decision whether that’s good enough or if human intervention is needed. No one has figured that out for human translation.

Catching Up On Readings: AI Index 2021

This feature by Shana Lynch summarizes the state of AI in ten charts based on The AI Index 2021, a report from Stanford University. The total global investment in AI increased by 40% to $67.9 billion in 2020. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One of the trends that I am following closely is Platform-as-a-Service. We are in the middle of it because of what we do. We are working with various developer ecosystems and in conversation with various others to do stuff with them.

The Platform-as-a-Service trend is building up quite significantly, so people are building one use case fully and opening up their platforms to other developers to build other use cases. Is this a strategy that you are following or considering?

Colors: Varanasi II

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Varanasi II

Varanasi II | Sramana Mitra, 2018 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pens | 18  x 24, On Paper

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your leads come from the marketplaces? Is Zendesk sending you a lot of leads?

Vasco Pedro: We operate on account-based marketing and selling. We have identified several accounts that fit our ICP and then we use AVM strategies for go-to-market motion. One of the key aspects is partnerships. We work closely with BPOs like Concentrix and Teleperformance and others. They end up being a lot of the lead generators for us.