Bootstrapped European Entrepreneurs

29/04/2022

Zoran Perović, had an impressive corporate career, but then decided to make a fresh start and co-founded Serbian Open eXchange. He tells us how he founded SOX, how he grew it, and what his plans are for the future. Listen to the latest episode.

Listen now | Zoran Perović, had an impressive corporate career but then decided to start again and co-founded Serbian Open Exchange. Internet exchanges provide the critical service of connecting content providers with various carriers, thus making the Internet faster and more reliable for us, end u...

13/04/2022

Matej Bešter, co-founder and CMO, tells the story of their start with the weight loss course Popolna Postava and subsequent focus on high-quality dietary supplements to grow faster. Learn how they expanded their presence across Europe and their approach to entering new markets.

Listen now (43 min) | Sometimes it makes sense to move into an adjacent industry to grow faster. This is the story of Golden Tree, an e-commerce company focused entirely on selling high-quality dietary supplements in several European countries. In this episode, Matej Bešter, co-founder and CMO, exp...

06/04/2022

Is it really a good idea to sell your SaaS app indirectly through partners as the main channel?
Wences Garcia from marketgoo thinks so, and they have been very successful with it. Listen to him explain how working with partners changes the company's focus and, most importantly, how they built their impressive company culture. Find out all this in the latest episode of the DHH's podcast.

Listen now | Why decide not to sell directly to the end customer, but to use partners as the main sales channel? marketgoo develops do-it-yourself SEO tools for small and medium-sized businesses, and decided to quickly reach a larger potential customer base this way.In this episode, Wences Garcia, f...

31/03/2022

It is always enlightening to discuss with someone who has succeeded where you yourself have failed. Krešimir Končić has built Neuralab into the world's leading agency specialized in their niche. How? Find out in the latest episode of the Bootstrapped European Entrepreneurs podcast.

Listen now | A narrow niche and focus on technical excellence have made Neuralab one of the world's leading WooCommerce experts. In this episode, founder and CEO, Krešimir Končić explains: how and why they have positioned themselves as world-class WordPress and Woocommerce experts,

24/03/2022

Dealing with big corporations can be a headache for an entrepreneurial person. Boris Kapitanovič, co-founder of Workshares, a special kind of consulting firm focused on increasing productivity in businesses, has made this his bread and butter.
Listen to Boris explain what his approach looks like.

Listen now | Dealing with big corporations can be a headache for an entrepreneurial person. Boris Kapitanovič, co-founder of Workshares, a special kind of consulting firm focused on increasing productivity in businesses, has made this his bread and butter. In this episode, we talk about:

16/03/2022

For some, freelancing is a career choice; for others, it's just a stepping stone. For Milan Savov, CEO and founder of SmartClick - Web and SEO Agency from , it was the latter. What sets them apart from many other agencies is the fact that they have been focused on global clients from the very beginning.

Listen to Milan explaining how they approached this challenge in the latest episode.

Listen now | For some, freelancing is a career choice; for others, it's just a stepping stone. For Milan Savov, CEO and founder of Smartclick, a web and SEO agency from North Macedonia, it was the latter. What sets them apart from many other agencies is the fact that they have been focused on global...

09/03/2022

What drove Senad Šantić to abandon the ideal of living off passive income and started ZenDev, a successful software consultancy from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Why just running ZenDev was not enough and how they approach building their own products.
Listen to Senad explaining this and more in the latest episode.

Listen now | Senad Šantić started pursuing ideal of passive income while being a student. He later realized that he wants to build something more, which led to co-founding of ZenDev, a software development consultancy from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Looking ahead he decided that it would make sense t...

02/03/2022

The latest guest on the Bootstrapped European Entrepreneurs podcast is a prototypical serial entrepreneur, Jan de Jong. He grew his first company to 400 employees and, after a successful exit, quickly returned to the entrepreneurial path by co-founding Webpower Adria, an email marketing company, and Crop, a company that seeks to improve Croatia's position as a food producer.

Listen to the podcast to hear how he manages to spearhead so many initiatives.

Starting a business abroad can be a challenge. Jan de Jong has done it several times, the first time as a Dutch student starting a contact center in Croatia. Today he is involved in several ventures, most notably the email marketing company Webpower Adria.

23/02/2022

Marketplace businesses are notoriously hard to grow. So you can imagine how excited we are to host Tosho Trajanov, the founder of Adeva, a company that helps hiring engineering talent at scale easier while at the same time bringing tech professionals around the world equal opportunities no matter their location, gender, or race.

Listen to the podcast to hear how they are addressing the challenges of growing their marketplace.

Listen now | Freelancing sometimes looks like an ideal job where you can choose your own projects and set your own schedule, but the reality, as always, is different. As Tosho Trajanov experienced firsthand, you have to take care of sales and client relations, and the actual technical work you want....

16/02/2022

Faris Začina and his co-founders started Ministry of Programming with the goal of providing startups with a development outsourcing service. Today, Ministry of Programming is a software design, development and investment company that specializes in working with startups. Listen to the podcast to learn how they achieved this.

Listen now (48 min) | Faris Začina and his co-founders started Ministry of Programming with the goal of providing startups with a development outsourcing service. Today, Ministry of Programming is a software design, development and investment company that specializes in working with startups. Liste...

09/02/2022

Would you completely remove your best-selling product from your product line? A product that generates more than 2 € million in sales (40+% of total sales)? Antonio Baldassarra of Seeweb did just that, enabling the company to become the leading cloud provider in Italy. Listen to how he approaches change in the latest episode of the podcast.

Listen now (69 min) | Pivoting is second nature to startups, but what about more mature companies with revenues of €5 million or more? In this episode, we have the opportunity to discuss this topic with Antonio Baldassarra, a co-founder and CEO of Seeweb, a leading Italian cloud provider.

02/02/2022

Would you be willing to close a successful company and bet everything on a scrappy SaaS startup that had only a few subscribers at the time? Nikola Bojkov did just that. Using a freemium approach, EmbedSocial grew to considerable size and now has a full-fledged product suite in their field. Listen to the latest episode via the link below.

Listen now | Some would be afraid to decide to close down a reputable agency with Facebook marketing partner status, drastically downsize and focus on scrappy startup. Not Nikola Bojkov and his co-founders at Embed Social. They went all in and a few years later they are profitable, bootstrapped and....

26/01/2022

Sometimes, when the right person is at the intersection of academic research and understanding a problem, a novel product emerges. Such is the case with Matej Guid and his company InstaText, which has developed an AI-based writing assistant. How did they manage to gain hundreds of thousands of users in just two years? Listen to the episode and find out!

Listen now | Sometimes you have to be in the right place at the right time to even recognize the problem. If you have the ability to solve it, you are well positioned to develop a unique product. Our guest this week is Matej Guid, an academic who is already on his second company, InstaText,

19/01/2022

Another story about a trailblazing entrepreneur, this time from Serbia. Danko Jevtović, co-founded not one, but two nationally well recognized companies, Jugodata and SezamPro. In this episode we cover the growth of SezamPro, an eventual exit and also, the life of an entrepreneur after an exit.

Listen to the latest episode of the Bootstrapped European Entrepreneurs podcast.
Listen here: https://www.bootstrappedentrepreneurs.eu/p/from-helping-a-local-bbs-to-governing

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12/01/2022

Being a trailblazer is never easy. Imagine being a first generation entrepreneur in a country that has just transitioned to capitalism. It may lead to mistakes, maybe even bankruptcy, as was the case with our guest in this episode Andrej Mertelj. Listen in to hear how he used this experience as the foundation and driving force for his next venture, Datalab. Eventually this led to the first entrepreneurial IPO in Slovenia.

Listen now | Being a trailblazer is never easy. Imagine being a first generation entrepreneur in a country that has just transitioned to capitalism. It may lead to mistakes, maybe even bankruptcy, as was the case with our guest in this episode Andrej Mertelj. Listen in to hear how he used this exper...

22/12/2021

What did Dejan Murko and the team at Niteo learn about developing software for niche markets? Listen to the third episode of Bootstrapped European Entrepreneurs and you'll find out :-)

Can early success be an obstacle in your entrepreneurial journey? In this episode, our guest Dejan Murko, co-founder and project lead at SaaS studio Niteo, answers this question by sharing his personal experience. Listen now!

15/12/2021

We managed to convince our colleague Boško Radivojević to give his first ever podcast interview and be a guest on the second episode of the Bootstrapped European Entrepreneur Podcast. He is the co-founder of Mainstream and MCloud and has led these two companies to market leadership in Serbia. How they managed to do that? Listen to the episode and find out. Use the link below or find the podcast in your favourite app.

What would you do if you noticed a customer need that your current employer was unwilling to serve? In this episode, we sit down with Boško Radivojević, who was prompted by such an opportunity to co-found Mainstream, a leading managed hosting and managed cloud provider in Serbia. Listen now!

08/12/2021

Our first guest is Dejan Pelzel Grofelnik from bunny.net. He has tripled his company's revenue in each of the last 3 years, all bootstrapped so far.
Learn more about how he turned his side hustle into an amazingly fast growing business.

You can listen to this episode on the website below or find the show in favourite podcasting app.

The company is often, if not always, a reflection of its founder. In this episode we explore this fact with Dejan Grobelnik Pelzel, founder & CEO of bunny.net. Their first product was Bunny CDN, a content delivery network, a service that helps websites around the world be faster. Listen now and lear...