Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a global customer base?

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes. We’re focused on Australia while we were launching it, but we’ve got customers in America, and companies in Australia that have stores in Singapore, the UK, and Europe. We now have two or three partners in America. That’s all going to kick off this year as we do our America expansion.

The goal is to get it up to a point where someone acquires us. I’d be very surprised if Salesforce doesn’t acquire. It’s an SMB e-commerce solution that they don’t have. They can’t take their B2C solution and make it small business-friendly because it’s going to piss off their enterprise customers. They just can’t reprice it. StoreConnect has been interesting. Our first investor was our first client.

Sramana Mitra: I was about to ask you. You have an investment in this fund, right?

Mikel Lindsaar: I’ve taken on close to a million dollars in investment.

Sramana Mitra: Which is nothing, really.

Mikel Lindsaar: Right. The rest is bootstrapped. I’ve put in $4 million just in wages myself. I bootstrapped from my previous businesses. That small investment has all been through agreements. Later this year, we’ll raise Series A. We plan to be revenue-positive by then. We’ll probably be revenue positive in the next few months. It’s a very interesting journey on how we’re trying to do this.

Sramana Mitra: Discipline of bootstrapping is helpful.

Mikel Lindsaar: You need to be able to know and back yourself. At the end of the day, any problem is surmountable if you break it down into small enough chunks and do something about it.
I’ve had situations where I didn’t know how I was going to make it. I mortgaged everything to make sure we didn’t fire a single staff member. All reduced their wage and employment time.

I put myself into horrendous debt to make sure we can get through that period. At the end of every downturn, there’s an upturn. I just have to stay alive long enough. Our consulting company just exploded. We’re the only ones left. We’re getting all of this work. StoreConnect and MetaPulse have both been incubating through that period. They’ve both been growing at the same time.

Sramana Mitra: You’re using a services company to incubate ideas. For most of them, you launched, then got some clients, and sold. There are a couple that you continue to build, but your intent is to sell.

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes and no. MetaPulse is my baby. I’ll probably keep that.

Sramana Mitra: How big is that?

Mikel Lindsaar: That does about a million a year. We’ll probably get to a point where I’ll sell StoreConnect and reinteractive. Then I’ll turn MetaPulse into something massive. It has the most potential for growth. It’s just a long growth curve. There are different SaaS products. StoreConnect’s feature list is smaller than what MetaPulse needs to get to that need-to-buy moment from the client.

Sramana Mitra: StoreConnect does seem to be on a good trajectory with the leads you’re getting from Salesforce and the movement you get from Shopify and BigCommerce. How big do you think you need to build it to get the scale of exit that you’re looking for?

Mikel Lindsaar: The TAM is massive. Probably to $100 million. I think we can get to a hundred million in revenue in two or three years. The speed at which we can sign up customers is reducing every month. We’re closing that sales loop. I had massive sales and revenue at the start of this year by making the decision that StoreConnect doesn’t do installation or configuration services.

StoreConnect doesn’t provide professional services to our clients. So, we had no sales for the first six months of this year. I started creating a partner channel that does the installation, setup, and ongoing maintenance. I had to train them and I had to do it.

What we found was when I was doing the installations, I got overwhelmed. I outsold our capacity in three weeks. I could start hiring Salesforce consultants by the dozen and they’re incredibly expensive. They’re very rare. Or how can we switch it into a partner-led channel and take a hit on revenue?

Luckily enough, I had my other businesses bootstrapped where I could sustain that. We switched over to the partner-led models. Now we’ve got partners bringing us clients. We’ll sign a partner and they’ll give us 5 or 10 prospects straight off the bat.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar
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