Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire this very fragmented customer base?

Stefan Batory: Initially, we weren’t been thinking about that because we were supposed to work with that partner from southeast Florida who was supposed to acquire clients for us.

When we decided to pivot our business model, we started experimenting with Facebook, Instagram, and Google AdWords to see what are the best strategies. We were just running a lot of experiments and tests with different copies and different visuals to see what was the most appealing messaging and how to find our target group.

Since the beauty industry is very visual, and a lot of our potential salon clients and stylists are on Facebook and Instagram, it turned out that Facebook and Instagram became our best acquisition channel. Our clients were there posting their work. It was easy to reach out to them and convey our message in those two channels.

Sramana Mitra: You obviously pivoted to find a different segment and product-market fit. When did you find that product-market fit? Can you pinpoint when it was?

Stefan Batory: Q1 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Then when did you validate the customer acquisition channel? How long did it take you to go further from there to figure out where the customer acquisition is going to happen from?

Stefan Batory: Another few months. In June 2015, we validated it and we started fundraising. We raised our first seed round in July 31st 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Stefan Batory: Today, we have nearly 7 million consumers using the app. We are hoping to cross a hundred million dollars in the next couple of years.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Talk about how you run your company. How much of your work is still happening in Poland?

Stefan Batory: I moved to the US 18 months ago. When we got our first round in July 2015, we were already operating in the US and Poland. However, we were running the US market completely remotely. We quickly found out that we needed to hire a representative in the US to help our US clients.

We hired a couple of friends from the classified media company. At that time, they started laying off people. We hired the first two of them in July. They were working from their home offices. I think Phyllis was the first one we hired. She’s from Kentucky. Then we hired Leann. She worked from Southern California.

We started growing very fast, so we had to hire a couple more people. They referred us to other reps. We hired two more people at the end of 2015. We were still running the business remotely from Poland.

Then in the beginning of 2016, we started thinking how to scale up the business in the US. We decided to set up a formal entity and launch an office. We chose to launch in Chicago and started hiring people in Chicago.

The whole of 2016 and 2017, we were growing and just making those small steps of iterating and testing. We were hiring every few weeks. We grew the whole business and company over 3x year over year in 2016 and 2017.

Then at the same time, we launched a number of international markets including the UK, Philippines, Singapore, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Argentina. All together, we are running 10 different markets. In 2017, we realized that we’ve stretched ourselves too much. We didn’t want to raise more money because we would dilute ourselves too much.

We had to make the first tough decision of which market to beg out from. We chose to close our offices in the Philippines, Singapore, Buenos Aires, and India. These markets were growing the slowest. We had to choose where we allocate our resources.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy
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