Founders Unfiltered Episode 33:

Chinmay grew up in Bombay where he was surrounded by small businesses. His father had a textile factory and his mom ran a boutique tailor shop. They emphasized on Chinmay’s education so that he could get a stable job.

After graduating from college, Chinmay got a job in Singapore as a software engineer. He later became a product manager and worked in Southeast Asia for 6 years. While working he met his co-founder Abhinay and found some great mentors, who encouraged them to startup.

The two brainstormed over a lot of ideas and tried narrowing down one. Building for MSMEs was one that stood out.

In Indonesia, SMEs’ contribution makes up 60% of the GDP, indicating a huge opportunity. And the majority of the business was still carried out using traditional ways.
Bukuwarung started out as a bookkeeping app for small shops, helping merchants maintain their cash flow.

In just 2 years after its start, Bukuwarung is now trusted by over 6.5 million+ users in Indonesia.

For more details visit: https://ajuniorvc.com/podcast/

About the Hosts :

Aviral Bhatnagar is a VC at Venture Highway and is the Founder of A Junior VC. He started the A Junior VC Newsletter in 2018 after observing whitespace in conversations in the Indian Venture ecosystem. He completed his B. Tech from IIT Bombay and MBA from IIM Ahmedabad.

Mazin Biviji is a Product Owner at Agoda and a founding member of A Junior VC. He previously worked at Deloitte as a Senior Consultant. He completed his MSE and BSE from the University of Michigan and his MBA from INSEAD.

Join us at https://ajuniorvc.com/community/ to be a part of an exclusive community and grab the opportunity to question and hear our guests live every Sunday.

Timecodes:

0:00 – Intro
1:59 – Early days
6:10 – Starting BukuWarung journey in Indonesia
11:17 – Growth of BukuWarung
13:56 – Challenges if Indonesian market
17:50 – First customers
20:59 – Talking to Indonesian customers
22:36 – The influence of early days
25:53 – Building the team
27:48 – Spending time recruiting
29:55 – Learnings from cultural challenges
33:52 – Fundraising in Indonesia
36:13 – Advice for building in Indonesia
37:26 – BukuWarung’s future
39:04 – Unfiltered feedback
40:32 – Outro

#ajvc #startups #india

Want to understand how startup funding rounds really work? In this video, I’ll deconstruct and explain the startup funding rounds, why they’re created and how they’re used.

Exclusive Download: Fundraising Like a Pro – Learn the 3 phases of fundraising and a 7 week process for starting & closing your next round of funding – https://bit.ly/3abv1Ne

—

Listen to the audio version on…
+ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2uI9BEF
+ Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2WOsXkS

Let’s connect on…
+ Instagram (behind the scenes): http://instagram.com/danmartell
+ Facebook (live trainings + Q &A): http://FB.com/DanMartell
+ Twitter (what I’m reading): http://twitter.com/danmartell

Join my exclusive Scaling SaaS Founders Facebook Group: https://www.danmartell.com/scaling-saas-founders

—

Let me demystify this complex, confusing strategy they call:

Startup Funding Rounds.

Yeah, you’ve heard the words thrown around before.

“We’re raising our series B”, and “I’m looking for a pre-seed angel investor” or “We’re gearing up for an IPO”…

They may as well be talking another language, right?

Except that somewhere between those phrases, letters and acronyms is a reliable, rock-solid funding strategy that is PROVEN to work again and again.

It has turned founders into billionaires…

Put CEOs on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine…

And transformed back-of-napkin ideas into living breathing companies.

So let’s cut to the bone and spell out the sequential funding rounds in PLAIN ENGLISH.

Including:

– What each funding round means
– How much money you can expect from each round
– Who provides that money
– How to tell which round a business needs next
– Who leads a company through each round
– Why the rounds even exist in the first place!

If there’s a part of you that feels intimidated because you don’t yet understand all the “CEO talk” (yes, I’m using air quotes here), then don’t worry.

I didn’t either.

Now I could write a dictionary on “corporate jargon” 3-houses-thick and I would never even recommend anyone reads it.

But in those early days, I was beating down doors to find someone – anyone – that could spell out the basics when I was trying to start my first business.

By the end of this video, startup funding rounds will finally make sense.

Drop me a comment if you’re still not sure about anything.

I’d love to hear from you.

Dan “plain-English” Martell

Don’t forget to share this entrepreneurial advice with your friends, so they can learn too: https://youtu.be/5xeumS_ldYk

=====================
ABOUT DAN MARTELL
=====================

“You can only keep what you give away.” That’s the mantra that’s shaped Dan Martell from a struggling 20-something business owner in the Canadian Maritimes (which is way out east) to a successful startup founder who’s raised more than $3 million in venture funding and exited not one… not two… but three tech businesses: Clarity.fm, Spheric, and Flowtown.

You can only keep what you give away. That philosophy has led Dan to invest in 33+ early stage startups such as Udemy, Intercom, Unbounce, and Foodspotting. It’s also helped him shape the future of Hootsuite as an advisor to the social media tour de force.

An activator, a tech geek, an adrenaline seeker and, yes, a romantic (ask his wife Renee), Dan has recently turned his attention to teaching startups a fundamental, little-discussed lesson that directly impacts their growth: how to scale. You’ll find not only incredible insights in every moment of every talk Dan gives – but also highly actionable takeaways that will propel your business forward. Because Dan gives freely of all that he knows. After all, you can only keep what you give away.

Exclusive Download: Fundraising Like a Pro – Learn the 3 phases of fundraising and a 7 week process for starting & closing your next round of funding – https://bit.ly/3abv1Ne

#DanMartell #SaaSAcademy

Successfully closing startup funding from investors takes planning. Starting from your earliest seed rounds with convertible notes and/or SAFEs (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) through to larger VC (venture capital funding) for each step you need to identify fundable milestones which, when you reach them, give you access to the next stage of funding. Each milestone has to be reachable with the resources you have available at that stage, and, when you reach the milestone, it needs to provide you with the credibility and traction to provide access to the next source of capital that can provide enough funding to fund your next milestone. You have to think multiple steps ahead to be successful! And you need to do enough of a cash-flow projection to know how much funding you’ll need for each milestone. The size of a funding round is not a guess – it’s based on what you’ll need to reach the next milestone!