In the last two decades, technology start-ups have become extremely popular, and today, investors do anything to try and secure an investment in a hot tech start-up.
Filip Boksa, CEO and co-founder of BookingKoala, a quickly growing platform that focuses on helping up and coming entrepreneurs and already existing service companies, grow, is sharing his story of turning down his first 1.6 million dollar investment and how he plans to turn BookingKoala into a billion-dollar SaaS company.
Let’s hear the entire story.
What is BookingKoala and why are the same investors that invested in, Slack, Facebook, and others so interested in it?
“This is a platform where you sign up, and in less than 60 seconds, you have a fully built website and software for a service business.”
You can one day decide to start a car detailing business, and within the same day, you can already be washing cars making money and competing with multi-million dollar companies.
BookingKoala was the software we created to help scale our cleaning service platform to over $5,000,000 in 3 short years. It did all the work for you saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars annually while increasing our sales and profits drastically.
Later, when I realized this software could be used to grow most of the service type businesses, I decided to team up with the person who built the software to help others start and grow their existing service businesses.
People want to invest in it because they realize what it can do and that it’s not a software that can be replicated easily. There is only a handful of people in the world that can come up with something like what we’ve built.”
How did they learn about BookingKoala?
“People knew of BookingKoala months before we launched.
Those that know me know how much I hate wasting time, so I decided to start growing a pre-launch list months before the company was ready to go live.
When it was time to go live, we already had people ready to use it.
This is how investors found out about Bookingkoala, and this is how we signed up over 500 customers in the first 12 weeks of our launch.”
Why did you pass up on the investment?
“Investors pitch me multiple times a day over email, social media, mail, and phone. I don’t even know how they find some of that information. They also harass my employees and my partners to get a meeting.
Out of curiosity, I decided to answer one of them. I told them my vision for the company, later I had to come back to meet with lawyers, and on the 3rd visit, we were offered $1.6 million.
I decided to learn more about the process, and at the end of the day, we weren’t a good fit for each other. The investors had a completely different vision for the company.”
Do you think companies need investor money to win today?
“It depends on what kind of company you are trying to build. Growing a service business like King of Maids (my cleaning platform) is much easier and more cost-effective to develop versus something like BookingKoala or SalesHangry a separate software we own and have built.
Because of BookingKoala, you can start a service business and become profitable with an investment of $1,000 or less. Lots of our users do it.
Software like BookingKoala can take years and a fortune to build. I had money saved up after growing King of Maids, and I established the connections needed to accomplish this type of task. If I started with BookingKoala first, I’d probably be forced to raise capital.
As you can see, the answer depends on a lot of factors, but certain companies can be started on a very tiny budget and do not require funding.”
How are you planning to grow BookingKoala?
“The plan is to deliver the perfect platform to grow a service business. We focus on things that users care about like making more money while saving time and eliminating costs.
Since we’ve launched, we’ve been getting good at that, and the word has started to get out there. We still have little things that hurt us such as bugs and some missing features, but our customers look past all of that because of where we are heading and the things that we do have compared to our competitors.
If we keep doing what we are doing, we will be at a great place, 2-3 years down the line.“
There you guys have it!
Make sure to leave us a comment and stay tuned for more interviews coming in the future.
