Bootstrapped Using Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company

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Booksy Co-founder and CEO Stefan Batory started a software development company in Poland with a few other partners.?Today, he’s running a high-growth, VC-funded SaaS and marketplace business in the US. Awesome journey! Here is our conversation from early 2020, plus you can listen to our podcast interview from 2021 here .

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Stefan Batory:?I’m from Warsaw, Poland. I was born and raised in one of the poorest parts of the country. I got a scholarship and went to a high school here in the US back in 1994.

I graduated from that high school and moved back to Poland where I studied Applied Mathematics at the Warsaw University of Technology. As I was finishing my degree, I started a software development company with seven other colleagues. We all worked together on the equivalent of Yahoo in Poland. We wanted to focus more on building tools for companies to leverage the internet that was emerging. We decided to launch our own company that would build tools for other companies.

We thought that the internet was going to change the way companies communicate with each other. The best way of anticipating the future is to create that future. We felt like we wanted to be part of that movement. We wanted to lead the change in Central and Eastern Europe. We started in January 2000. Then the dot-com bubble burst. Companies didn’t?really want to invest in internet projects.

We struggled for the first couple of years to make revenue. We had no prior experience. We had no portfolio. We didn’t have a product. It was very difficult for us to acquire clients. Three colleagues who were supposed to run the business side decided to leave. They left five of us who were engineers. I was one of the tech guys.

The five of us were stuck in a company that was losing money. The CEO, Head of Sales, and the Finance guy just left us. We had the choice to either shut down the company or try to make something out of it. The other four guys said, “Stefan, why don’t you lead?” That’s how I became a CEO.

I took on that responsibility and had to learn how to run a company and sell. It took me about two years to figure out everything given the difficult environment. We were bleeding money. All of us didn’t have salaries. From time to time, we just paid ourselves a couple of hundred dollars every few weeks. I ate potatoes for the first two years.?

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot of potatoes.?

Stefan Batory:?Back in the days, potatoes were the cheapest food I could afford. It was cheaper than rice. On some days, I was fed a proper dinner by my girlfriend’s parents. She’s my wife now. That’s how I survived the first two years.

I was advised to shut down the company. It just didn’t feel right. People we bought computers from wouldn’t get money back. People we rented our office from won’t get money back. We owed salaries. I decided to work as hard as I could to pay all the debt.

It turned out that after two years, we started getting traction. We started getting bigger clients and projects. We paid off the debt. We started growing really fast. We were tripling our revenue year by year.

Deloitte ranked us on the list of the top 50 fastest-growing companies in Central and Eastern Europe for seven consecutive years. They also put us in the top 500 fastest-growing companies in Europe, Middle East, and Africa for three consecutive years. That’s how I started my journey as an entrepreneur.?

Our conversation continues here .

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