The Dawn
The adventure of building Base CRM and what's next.
I’m Bart. I started my first business when I was 22. A few years later I co-founded Base CRM. I worked on a product for 10 years as the CPO till 2018 when the company was acquired by Zendesk.
Now I’m launching Founders Pond - an initiative to help new founders to build companies. Read on to learn who I am, why it might actually be a good idea and how I could help you.
Going back to my story, I worked at Zendesk for 3 years - for the first time I was a part of a large organization and I didn’t work for “myself”. I love the idea of freedom, responsibility, nimbleness and impact. These are not the characteristics one can easily experience in a large organization. But there are other ones like a nice salary, a steady career path, job stability and work-life balance. There is no right or wrong, but personally, I choose to work in a startup.
But let’s start from the beginning. We founded Base with a group of 5 people. All founders previously run mid-size web agencies. Uzi - my partner and CEO of Base - noticed that sales management software available on the market is complex and expensive. So the problem was clear. In order to manage sales one needs to effectively track interactions with customers and prospects. We realized that a simple, intuitive and affordable solution, specifically for small businesses was missing. It was 2009, the SaaS model was still in its infancy. We believed, however, that more companies would use SaaS cloud solutions in coming years.
We gave it a shot. Built the first version of the product in 6 months. Launched it and after a while, the first customer showed up. Paying customers changed the game. They made it real. Now the challenge changed from - how do I know if what I do is needed, to how to bring more customers in. It was a good challenge to have.
The following 9 years was a fast paced roller coaster. Among other things we managed to:
Convince tens of thousands of sales people to use Base
Introduce Base to companies where hundreds of employees used our software daily - imagine entering a huge office where each screen displays “your” software
Build an incredible team of 200+ people
Raise more than 50M USD in 4 rounds of financing
Run a tight operation between the two main offices, Krakow and Silicon Valley
Scale production, tech, sales, marketing, finance, HR, customer success
Get acquired and become a gate for Zendesk to enter the sales software market
It was fun. I loved it. With the right people and mindset it’s an absolutely incredible experience.
After leaving Zendesk more than one year ago I started thinking about what I should focus on next. There are really two viable paths I think. The first one is either starting or joining an early stage company. The second is to help founders in the early stage of their journey.
I haven’t yet noticed a problem which I would like to commit to solving for the next couple of years, so that rules out the first route, at least for now. At the same time I, did a few early stage investments. I found that working with founders is something which I enjoy doing and it seems to be bringing value to them.
Given that, I went through the following thinking process:
There are problems and challenges which are not addressed. These can be solved with technology.
To build a successful startup, someone needs to notice an inefficiency in the world and come up with an idea of how to fix it. By creating and refining the initial solution, founders gain a deeper understanding of the root problem that requires solving.
The founders are the key to a startup's success.
Young people may have the necessary skills to handle the technological aspects of developing a product. At the same time their understanding of other aspects of running a business might be limited.
As a result some startups might not get started, others might face lots of challenges which could be avoided if the necessary expertise and experience was available to the founders.
There are immense advantages of starting a business early:
The biggest one is an ease of finding a co-founder
Typically there are less overheads and responsibilities
It’s much easier to commit to a project in a big way
Founders Pond is an initiative which hopefully helps new founders gain necessary knowledge of how to start and run a startup. I hope it will encourage people to commercialize their ideas more often.
By no means am I saying that I know it all. However, specifically in the beginning of a startup journey, there are so many questions to be answered which we had to answer ourselves many times in Base. Things like:
How and who to start with?
Is the problem I’m trying to solve a significant one?
Who are my customers and how to acquire them?
How to hire and build a team?
What to focus on?
What and how to measure things?
How to raise and how to spend money?
I’m planning to write a series of blog posts with various learnings and insights from running Base. I hope that over time it will allow founders to learn something useful.
Additionally I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.