Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are in Chicago and Warsaw?

Stefan Batory: Today we have offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa, and San Antonio in the US. We have offices in Warsaw and a few other cities across the country. We are also in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and in Madrid. These are the markets that we actively go after and operate in.

Sramana Mitra: How many people?

Stefan Batory: We are 320 people all together across these six markets. However, the US and Poland are the two biggest ones with over a hundred people in each. US has a much bigger sales and marketing organization than Poland does. Poland is over indexed in the head count because our engineering is in Poland.

A year and a half ago, I decided to move to the US because the market was growing so fast. We had to make sure that our DNA is preserved. At the same time, I started flying to the US more frequently. I was spending two weeks in US and two weeks in Poland. After doing that for six months, we decided that it would be best for us if we moved to the US. 

Sramana Mitra: The last topic that I should explore with you is financing. Is this all bootstrapped or have you ever taken financing?

Stefan Batory: We have taken nearly $50 million. The round in June last year was for $28.5 million. We’ll be looking to raise another round in the next 9 to 12 months to double-down on the US.

Sramana Mitra: When was the first time you raised money?

Stefan Batory: The first time was July 2015.

Sramana Mitra: How much was your ARR at that point?

Stefan Batory: It was close to zero. We had around 50 paying merchants. They were paying us $30 per month.

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you take up money from?

Stefan Batory: It was led by Inovo which is the best Polish VC. We had two co-investors. One was one of UK’s best marketplace investors, Piton Capital. The other was a German corporate VC Muller Medien.

Sramana Mitra: When was the first time you took American money? Chronologically, where does that fall?

Stefan Batory: The first time we took money from a US investor was two years ago.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that?

Stefan Batory: It was from an angel investor. It was a couple hundred thousand dollars. 

Sramana Mitra: It’s not much.

Stefan Batory: Right. It was part of the last round, which was for $13.2 million. It was mostly from European investors. Today we have a very international investor base. We have investors from all over the world – Japan, Singapore, Indonesia. 

Sramana Mitra: Why is the distribution so varied?

Stefan Batory: We got money from investors with values. The investors who came on board were either angel investors that I wanted to have on board because of their experience of being operators. We got the co-Founders of GoJek who built that business and scaled it to $10 billion. They operate in 150 different markets. I was looking to pick their brains because this is exactly the route we want to go.

We will be launching new markets city by city. Today we are not even looking at our markets as countries. We are more focused. We also got a guy who worked for Spotify as Head of International Growth. I wanted to have access to their brains. On the other hand, we got investors who knew the space and who had past investments in similar businesses. 

Sramana Mitra: Great.

Stefan Batory: If I can just add one more thing, we doubled down on the US two years ago. Today we are proud to say that we are the biggest and the fastest-growing beauty marketplace in the US. It’s also true of each of the markets that I mentioned. 

Sramana Mitra: You were not only able to do the subscription business; you’ve also got the marketplace now.

Stefan Batory: Yes. We are a SaaS-enabled marketplace. We have over 7 million people using Booksy with nearly four million of them in the US. This is what makes us a viable marketplace. That’s also one of the differentiators. There’s a lot of software providers in the space but they are more like ERP systems.

We are doing those two things at the same time. We are a back office system for them to manage their business. At the same time, we are also a very valuable tool for them to acquire new clients. That is why we started focusing on local markets and building a marketplace.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting story. How much of your business is coming out of the marketplace transactions versus subscription revenue?

Stefan Batory: 80% is coming from subscription and 20% from transactions. However we’ve grown our marketplace 10x year-over-year. We have pockets where we are making two times the revenue from the marketplace than from subscription.

Sramana Mitra: Great story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy
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