John Darbyshire personally invested $12.5 million to self-fund SmartSuite
Jon Darbyshire · Fastest Growing Ever? How He Went From $0 to $1.2m in 4 Weeks · Mar 6, 2022 · at 11:24
SmartSuite founder John Darbyshire discusses bootstrapping his SaaS workflow management platform in stealth for three years without outside venture capital.
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“I funded it myself. We put in about 12 and a half million to date to kind of get to where we're at.”
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SmartSuite operates with zero employees and two co-founders using agency contractors
“We have no employees in place. I have two co-founders We hired teams of people inside of companies. I think we have five different main companies that we work with from a development perspective.”
Darbyshire: Bain invested at $70M pre-money nine months before $200M exit
“Bain came in and invested, I think it was a seventy million dollar pre. It allowed me to take some money off the table. They bought about 20% of the company. They allowed the employees to cash out a portion of their stock options at that time, so it was It was…”
Darbyshire: SmartSuite contracted its entire design team exclusively via Upwork
“He is. His team. So he's got a team of three or four people that work with him. Very reasonable rates for that team. And they got rid of everything else about a year and a half ago, so they, that's basically our design team.”
Darbyshire: Personally invested $12.5M to build SmartSuite's MVP
“It's unusual to spend 12 and a half million dollars on a, on an MVP, but for the idea that we had here, it was something that we needed to do. I personally put that money in today.”