Kalzumeus Podcast Episode 11: Bootstrapping vs. Raising Money

Keith and I are joined by special guest Jay Winder, CEO of MakeLeaps, in this 11th episode of the podcast.  We talk a bit about doing business in Japan, raising money vs. bootstrapping as a SaaS company, how AngelList is going to eat the world, and the usual eclectic mix of topics.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• Why you should negotiate from a position of strength and abundance.
• How to raise a round of funding through AngelList while not being in Silicon Valley.
• Why AngelList Syndicates are the future of seed stage fundraising.
• How to manage relations with investors when you have lots of them.
• How running a bootstrapped SaaS company is different than one which has raised early investment rounds.
• How the SaaS market is different in Japan.
• A bit about Jason’s new project, Sales for Geeks.

A brief announcement: Keith and his co-founded Rachel launched a new product recently called Segmetrics.  It’s Baremetrics, for InfusionSoft — gives you actionable, one-look insight into which of your InfusionSoft segments (e.g. traffic sources) are producing results for your business.  If that sounds relevant, make with the clicky-clicky.

Podcast: Customer Onboarding

MP3 Download (~60 minutes, ~59.3 MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Bootstrapping vs. Raising Money

Patrick McKenzie:  Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 11th episode of the Kalzumeus podcast. I’m Patrick McKenzie, here with my noted co‑host, Keith Perhac and our good friend, Jay Winder as CEO of MakeLeaps here in Tokyo.

Keith Perhac:  I’m Keith. Welcome to the 11th episode. I can’t believe that we got this out, literally one week after our last episode.

Patrick:  This is downright scary.

Keith:  This is scary.

Patrick:  It’s almost like we have an actual podcast.

Keith:  I don’t think so. All right. Cool. Welcome, Jay.

Jay Winder:  Thank you. Hello. I appreciate the welcome. I was looking at you guys doing a podcast behind a thick Plexiglas window and I think, “Geez, that looks really warm and cozy inside that little podcast igloo”, so thank you very much for inviting me in. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Patrick:  We’re happy to have you from outside in the cold.

Jay:  Well, we have an air‑conditioner right here.

Keith:  Hopefully you guys cannot hear, otherwise our editor is going to be very, very mad at us.

Patrick:  Very, very angry at us.

Keith:  In fact…

Jay:  Should we turn it off?

Patrick:  We were testing a little bit ago and it sounded OK.

Keith:  You couldn’t hear it.

Patrick:  Alright, so we’ll be talking about a few different things this time. Jay has a SaaS business called MakeLeaps. Why don’t you just give us a little bit of background on w