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How to Bootstrap Startups by Piggybacking with Sramana Mitra
Rating: 4.9 out of 5(25 ratings)
134 students

How to Bootstrap Startups by Piggybacking with Sramana Mitra

Case Studies of Innovation & Business Model of How Startups Bootstrap by Piggybacking on Another Company's PaaS Platform
Created bySramana Mitra
Last updated 2/2025
English

What you'll learn

  • Through in-depth interviews with successful startup founders, learn what piggybacking strategy is and how to use it to bootstrap a startup.
  • Which new innovations and business models will allow for bootstrapping an idea to validation and profitability.
  • When to bring on a team while bootstrapping a startup.
  • When to start raising funds for your startup and go to VCs as kings, not beggars.
  • How to scale your startup when you are bootstrapping with limited resources.
  • What exit options are when bootstrapping a startup by piggybacking.

Course content

3 sections • 29 lectures • 12h 4m total length

  • Introduction1:35
  • How to Bootstrap a Startup by Piggybacking2:06
  • Bootstrapping with Services and Piggybacking from Australia44:25

    StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar has built a services company in Australia and spawned six SaaS products out of it. One of them, StoreConnect, is a terrific Bootstrapping by Piggybacking story on top of Salesforce.com. He has exited four of the apps, and expects to grow StoreConnect to $100M+ in revenue. Terrific story!

  • A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner55:14

    Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his middle-age crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, when we had this conversation in 2016, was doing well over $500 million in revenue and trading at a market cap of over $4 billion. Veeva was built on Salesforce and went public in 2013. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love this story.

  • Bootstrapping Using Services On Salesforce.com23:34

    John Stewart, CEO at MapAnything, discusses how he has bootstrapped his company using the “Bootstrapping Using Services on Salesforce.com” blueprint. Since this conversation, MapAnything was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2019.

  • Bootstrapping by Piggybacking with Evenica CEO Sadek Ali51:07

    Evenica CEO Sadek Ali has built an e-commerce platform company for the mid-market within the Microsoft ecosystem. Read on to learn more.

  • Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services44:40

    Quavo Co-founder David Chmielewski transitioned from a developer to an entrepreneur by leveraging his solid domain knowledge in a particular area of FinTech: dispute resolution for credit card transactions. He and his cofounders effectively used bootstrapping using services and piggybacked on the Pega Systems platform.

  • Thought Leader in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax31:53

    ServiceMax is one of the great success cases of the Bootstrapping by Piggybacking strategy that we espouse in 1Mby1M. It is also an excellent Vertical Cloud case study. Please study this case study to understand the nuances of how the company leveraged the Force.com platform in compelling ways.

  • Putting the Freshworks IPO in Context27:21

    Here I put the Freshworks IPO in context.

  • Conversation with Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator36:43

    Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem, including bootstrapping by piggybacking.

  • Bootstrapping CloudSense with Services on Force.com from London47:04

    When we had this conversation in 2014, the Force.com platform (now Salesforce Platform) was a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Co-founder CTO Alex Fuller and Co-founder CEO Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform.

  • Leveraging the E-commerce PaaS Marketplaces with AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan28:24

    CEO Andrew Chan has built AfterShip by heavily leveraging the e-commerce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Marketplaces.

  • Thought Leader in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, Founder of Vlocity36:24

    David was on the founding team of Siebel, back at the very beginning of the CRM industry. With Vlocity, he focused on the next wave of industry-specific cloud solutions. Excellent discussion on the future of enterprise software for when we spoke in 2015. Vlocity was acquired by Salesforce in June 2020 and is now officially Salesforce Industries. David Schmaier is now President & Chief Product Officer at Salesforce.

  • Thought Leader in AI: David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs35:24

    A terrific conversation with David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs, about NLP and domain specific taxonomy building within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. The company is following a platform strategy and inviting developers to build apps on its platform. 50% of the customers are ISVs building on top of their platform.

  • Thought Leader in AI: Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel27:39

    This is an awesome podcast interview with Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel, on the cutting edge of language translation. Note, a large chunk of Unbabel’s customer base comes from the Zendesk PaaS ecosystem. On the other hand, Unbabel itself would, most likely, create its own PaaS ecosystem to address a broader range of use cases.

  • Thought Leader in AI: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS27:34

    Martin Neale, CEO of ICS, has built his AI startup within the Microsoft ecosystem. He shares interesting perspectives on how to leverage Microsoft.

  • Thought Leader in AI: Pecan.ai CEO Zohar Bronfman28:54

    CEO Zohar Bronfman’s Pecan.ai is a terrific PaaS company in the making with substantial predictive capabilities.

  • Investor Perspective with Matt Holleran, Cloud Apps Capital Partners32:44

    Matt Holleran, General Partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, talks about his firm’s investment thesis in what he calls classic Series A. His is one of the rare firms that invest at the concept stage.

Requirements

  • The only requirement for this course is an open mind and a willingness to learn.

Description

The 1Mby1M Methodology is based on case studies. In this course, Sramana Mitra shares the tribal knowledge of tech entrepreneurs by giving students the rare seat at the table with the entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders who provide the most instructive perspectives on how to build a thriving business. Through these conversations, students gain access to case studies exploring the alleys of entrepreneurship. Sramana’s synthesis of key learnings and incisive analysis add great depth to each discussion.

We’ve discussed all kinds of creative bootstrapping mechanisms in this series of courses.

One of the most exciting trends in the technology industry currently is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Developer Eco-systems.

The company that has knocked the ball out of the park with its PaaS strategy is Salesforce. They launched their platform over a decade back, and many substantial companies, and numerous sustainable small businesses, have been built on it. Veeva, for example, was built this way with a small amount of capital, and today, boasts over $1B in revenue and over $20 billion in market cap.

My hypothesis is that of the 200+ SaaS companies that have achieved scale, we would see a set that would break out and become significant PaaS players.

This means, the industry would have 20-50 PaaS platforms with serious developer eco-systems and app marketplaces. The PaaS vendors would want to sell the apps developed on their platforms to their customer bases, take 30% in platform commission, and help support robust businesses while scaling themselves exponentially.

Entrepreneurs looking for a capital efficient strategy should seriously consider bootstrapping by piggybacking on these PaaS players.

This course takes a deep dive into Bootstrapping by Piggybacking on PaaS platforms.

The 1Mby1M courses are all heavily based on interview-based case studies on Innovation, Business Models, Go To Market Strategies, Validation Principles, and various other nuances of an entrepreneur's journey. We offer extensive opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn the lessons from the trenches from successful entrepreneurs who have done it before and Investors who support their ambition.

Who this course is for:

  • Ambitious entrepreneurs with limited resources who want to pursue ideas for which they have both passion and expertise.
  • Engineers who want to turn their tech knowledge into multi-million dollar revenue businesses by becoming startup founders rather than remain employees.
  • Aspiring founders who want to increase their chances of being accepted into top startup accelerators such as Y Combinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups.
  • Any entrepreneur who wants to learn from successful entrepreneurs who have done it before and from investors who have supported them.
  • Professors teaching technology entrepreneurship courses anywhere in the world.

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