Daneshgar: Modern Tools Make Early Marketplace Venture Capital Unnecessary
David Daneshgar · 20 year old wins $3m playing Poker, launches $4m bootstrapped SaaS · Mar 12, 2024 · at 10:01
David Daneshgar reflects on why his previous startup, Bloom Nation, had to raise venture capital a decade ago due to lacking technical founders.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The cardinal sin there is none of the three founders were technical, which by the way, like 10 years ago when I came out of the University of Chicago and we started out of there and like Grubhub or Etsy were just starting and you're building a marketplace business, there weren't as many no code and API tools as there are now. So it's harder to start. So you had agencies, you had, so I think there was maybe some reason for that, but I think if we were starting that now, there's probably no reason with all the tools.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from David Daneshgar
Daneshgar: Giving early-stage startups $5M leads to poor decision-making
“When someone starts a company, if someone gives them five million bucks, I think they make poor decisions. If the only way to hire people is through customers paying you on contracts, that means you have to actually build something that people want.”
Whippy Bootstrapped Growth by Scraping Displaced Zipwhip Customers After Twilio Acquisition
“Zipwhip was bought by Twilio and went out of business. So there was a feast for all the customers and like, we just started this. So I was able to pull a list from Zipwhip and then feed that to someone on Upwork to like get deeper into the data.”
Daneshgar: Asking for upfront payment is the only true product validation
“If you go to someone and you ask, hey, would you use this? 99% of them are not going to offend you. They're going to say yes. I mean, who's not going to tell you that at a dinner if they're your friends or something? But then if you go to someone, you're like,…”
Whippy Targets 70% Growth and $10M Bootstrapped ARR Within 24 Months
“I think kind of on our roadmap is probably, I would say, think about 70 to 75% this year, and maybe 50 the next, but, you know, within the next 24 months, definitely we want to be at ten million, and they are bootstrapped as well, so.”