Episode 566 | From Bootstrapped to Venture Backed with Hana Mohan

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Episode 566, Rob Walling chats with Hana Mohan about her journey as a SaaS founder. They compare and contrast bootstrapping and being venture-backed, hiring a chief of staff early on as a startup founder, and more. The topics we cover [2:17] Intro [3:36] Deciding not to bootstrap MagicBell [6:34] The team Composition at MagicBell [9:15] The marketing approaches that are working today. [10:47] Technology behind MagicBell [19:32] Bootstrapping vs raising funding [24:24] The importance of finding the right investors and hiring the right people [25:27] Hiring a Chief of Staff Links from the show Starting a new tech business as a transgender woman From Bootstrapped to Venture-Backed with Hana Mohan Hana Mohan (@unamashana) | Twitter If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you'd like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We'd love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the rest of us.
0:03.5	I'm Rob Walling.
0:04.2	This is episode 566 where I talk with Hannah Mohan about her journey as a SaaS founder.
0:11.4	She bootstrapped a company called Support B, which is a ticketing system for collaborative customer support.
0:17.2	She bootstrapped it over nine years to 45,000 in MRR, and then in 2020 sold
0:23.4	her stake to her business partner, then started Magic Bell, which is the notification
0:28.2	inbox for web and mobile applications. Started that in 2020, went through Wycombinator,
0:33.5	winter of 2021, and they're now sending more than a million notifications every month.
0:38.1	She raised a seed round, $1.9 million in spring about five or six months ago.
0:43.2	And so the fun part of the conversation is Hannah and I get to compare and contrast bootstrapping
0:47.2	and being venture-backed.
0:48.5	And in fact, we explore the gamut.
0:50.7	We start talking about how this isn't binary.
0:53.3	It isn't funded or not funded. That there are
0:55.1	in-betweens like Tiny Seed or like raising an angel round without getting on the venture track.
1:00.1	And Hana came on our radar when I believe producer Xander saw her do an AMA on indie hackers
1:06.5	that was starting a new tech business as a transgender woman in March of 2020.
1:11.9	And so she has a post on her own blog.
1:15.2	We'll link it up in the show notes, as well as an AMA on IndieHackers,
1:19.1	if you want to find out more about her journey.
1:22.3	And Hanna is speaking at MicroConf Europe in Croatia here in just a few weeks, I believe there's still a
1:29.5	ticket or two left. There's not very many left at this point, but if you want to be in Dubrovna,
	...

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