Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 2)

Stefan Batory: After 12 years of running that first company, I got a little bit tired of growing a company that was in the service business. To double the revenue, I had to double the headcount. When we got to over 200 engineers, I didn’t feel like I wanted to hire another 200 to double our revenue the next year and then 400 to double it the following year.

I started looking for a different business model that would help me to grow the topline without growing the team as much. At the end of 2011, I decided to launch the first taxi hailing app in Poland. We launched that in February 2012.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically using your services business revenues to bootstrap this taxi hailing company.

Stefan Batory: Yes, we launched that as a subsidiary. The traditional taxi dispatching companies started blocking the drivers from joining our app. That threatened our existence. Initially, the drivers said they would use the app. They love the idea. They love the business model.

We work only with licensed drivers, and all of them worked for traditional taxi dispatching companies at that time. They wanted to join the platform but because the traditional dispatching companies threatened them, they rather stayed with them.

It was a chicken and egg problem. They didn’t want to join because we didn’t have enough clients, and they’d be removed from the traditional dispatching companies. Most of them were scared to join us.

My partner, who ran the software development house with me, wanted to kill that business a few months after we launched it. But I believed that we would solve the problem in the long run. I decided to buy it back and left the first company that I started.

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of all this? Were you doing the taxi hailing from within the services company? How did you maneuver on the structural side?

Stefan Batory: The taxi business was 100%-owned by the software business. I decided to leave and buy it. I paid with my shares in the software business to get the taxi business out of it. We also detached one division from that software business that was focused on classified media companies. 

Sramana Mitra: Who ended up running the services business at this point? Did you have one of your partners to run that?

Stefan Batory: Yes. We already had tension between us for a couple of years prior to that, so it seems like a perfect solution for both of us. I wanted to do something that would be more scalable, and he just wanted to keep doing what that company was doing.

To make the long story short, that taxi business was about to die because we didn’t have enough drivers. Even though the consumers loved the idea, they couldn’t get any taxis, because taxi drivers didn’t want to join us.

I started thinking whether there was any other vertical that had super-fragmented supply and demand that would not have a man in the middle that would stop my supply side from joining the platform. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy
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