Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 1)

Ben and his co-founder are two techies who started by bootstrapping with a paycheck. With zero marketing budget, they have scaled TryHackMe to a million users and significant revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Ben Spring: I was born and raised in Portsmouth. I also went to the University of Portsmouth. I have a degree in Computer Science.

Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic! What are some of the nuances of go-to-market strategy that you have learned?

Matthew Benson: We took a shot at this influencer-based model. We created a tournament for a single influencer. Once we saw the spark, we doubled down on it. It was based on being receptive to the community and listening. That platform has become our main revenue driver.

Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 2)

Matthew Benson: We built the MVP for eFuse. Almost an entire year later, we launched the product on January 2, 2020. On the initial launch, we didn’t have much success. We were just getting rolling and stumbling during the first three to four months. COVID hits right about that time. All eyeballs go to gaming.

One of the pieces we picked up on is a lot of people were turning to run online eSports tournaments. We pivoted the business to focus on building eSports infrastructure to facilitate different types of competition. We built this platform that we call the Arena. The first day we launched it, we had 10,000 visitors. From that point forward, we scaled the business to 500,000 in that first year.

Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 1)

This interview is a fascinating look into the world of Gaming. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Matthew Benson: I’m born and raised in Ohio. I grew up an hour south of Columbus in a small town called Chillicothe. There wasn’t much going on down there.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 6)

Mikel Lindsaar: The really cool thing about StoreConnect business model is that Salesforce gets their license revenue and they get a very sticky customer who then is investing more into the platform. The partners love it because they get a client who has an upfront setup fee but has a part of their business related to that partner’s consulting revenue.

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.

Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 5)

Marnix Broer: We didn’t really have to dilute ownership to raise €100,000. However, if we didn’t have the €100,000, the decisions we made were probably tougher to make. If you have some money, you dare to take a bit more risk. It might have actually made a difference.

Later on in 2016, we raised from two venture capitalists – one in Amsterdam and one from Berlin. We showed them that we had a great working system in the Netherlands. We had a product-market fit. We were making revenues. We’ve just done the test in Belgium, Spain, and Australia. The students love the product as well.

Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did this idea come from?

Mikel Lindsaar: From the services business. reinteractive does a lot of customer applications connected to Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: Are all your product ideas from your services business?

Mikel Lindsaar: MetaPulse was something that I always wanted to build. I created my services business so I can create MetaPulse. StoreConnect came out of reinteractive.