Bootstrapping Vs Raising Capital with John Stojka of Sertifi

You found a problem and came up with an idea of how to solve it. All you have to do now is make it a reality. To do that you need a great plan to launch your business, get money, find your product-market fit, and so on. And one of the best ways to do that is by taking examples from successful SaaS founders, like John Stojka, the Co-Founder of Sertifi.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Bootstrapping versus raising capital
• Horizontal versus vertical markets
• How to find your vertical market

Finalizing Business Faster

Sertifi provides an agreement platform that brings contracts and payments together. Historically, people would send the contract, get it signed, and then request the payment. The platform combines those things into one process and builds a workflow around that. The idea for Sertifi came to John and Nick when they noticed that the contracts were getting lost and the contract execution component was time-consuming.

We thought that the most important thing was to make sure that the contract signing and the payment processes were easy - John Stojka

Bootstrapping Versus Funding a SaaS Business

If you raise too much money too quickly, the risk of you not having a great outcome can be higher, and there is also time pressure that comes from the investors. When investors give you money, they expect you to either become a huge success or die. When bootstrapping, you move at your own pace, and the chances of your business growing are much higher. But, if you don't invest enough, and you don't get the capital that you need, you could miss the market too, and someone else will fill the gap.

If you can get product market fit and some acceleration, I think you're pretty likely to get a base hit or a double, maybe even a triple. But if you're gonna raise a lot of capital, you will be gunning for that Grand Slam - John Stojka

Finding Your Vertical

If you build a product and choose a vertical market, you can expand to other verticals. Besides, in a vertical market, it may be an easier customer solution. A horizontal market is more challenging and competitive and requires more money to succeed. The challenge is to find your vertical. The best way to do that is by asking the following questions: Has this market adopted any tool like this yet? Is there a standard CRM or a place of integration I can integrate into? Is there a need for this product?

You pick a small pond, and you dominate it. We had this product that could solve various problems for many different people. But we didn't start getting success until about 2015 when we verticalized the solution for a specific vertical - John Stojka

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