Eran Galperin
speaker
76 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Eran Galperin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's surprisingly a large feeling of relief. It was the end of a very grueling, even though not long, maybe in comparative terms, but for me, long process of three months where basically every day I doubted that this would actually end up well. And many times, as sort of a psychological trick, I would kind of let myself feel, so what if it falls apart? It's all good.
And when the money actually hit the bank account, actually, it happened very fast. We closed the deal on a Friday, 30 minutes before the wire cut off time. And the funds were in the bank account the same day. I did not expect that before the weekend. And I'm just like, I guess it's over. I guess it's done. I can have a real night's sleep today and maybe the entire weekend.
And I literally slept like 14 hours a day for the entire weekend. That made me just a massive feeling of relief. Like all this weight just washed down.
It's kind of a mix of both. So I didn't really have an idea for things to buy, but I already had in my head a financial plan of how I'm going to deploy this. I'm a proponent of the FHIR methodology, if you heard of it. Financial independence retire early, and it basically revolves around investing in fund indexes that return a very stable amount every year.
And with this amount of money, I'm basically set for life if I follow this approach. So I knew I was going to do that. I ended up upgrading my car to basically the same model, but newer and higher trim. because I really like that car. And now we're in the process of, we bought a piece of land here in Tokyo where I live, and we're building a house on it. So that's super exciting.
Not something that I actually planned, but like a month after the sale was completed, it's like, you know what, we should start looking into it. And we're now in the process. Yeah, those are the major things.
So now I have an Audi RS3 for people who are into that kind of stuff. It's a nice car. It's still compact, which fits with the very narrow streets of Tokyo. But it's just a slight upgrade from the previous car, which was an S3. Basically exactly the same car on the inside, but a small upgrade that I felt like was well-deserved.
Yeah, so our investor is a private equity firm, and they did a majority acquisition of the company. They bought the majority stake of the company. I'm left with a minority stake in it, and some of the funds are going to be used to grow the company. The majority of it is for them to acquire the controlling stake of the company, and this is what the amount that is on the public statement is for.
Most of our customers just refer to us as MA on Rails or just MAOR for some reason. I hated that acronym, but a lot of them used it and I just ran with it. So yeah, at the time, I just winded down a previous company, a VC-backed company called BinPress that raised a seed round and just didn't grow enough to raise another round. And I was kind of burnt out on the VC model.
I felt that company had potential But because it didn't fit the VC timeline, it had to shut down. So I wanted to go in a different direction. Me and my co-founder kind of split paths. He moved to the dark side and became a VC partner. And I started a bootstrap company back then that was called Martial Arts on Rails.
I wanted to combine my hobby of many years, which was training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, nine years at the time, with my professional skills in software development. I did a lot of market research. Initially, I kind of tried avoiding going into the vertical we ended up going in, which is business management software. Because there's some very entrenched players in this space.
Now I know that that's actually an advantage. They do a lot of the customer education for us. There's obviously a lot of potential revenue to be had because they're so big. But back then it looked very intimidating. Eventually, I did decide to go that route just because everybody I talked to in this space said the current incumbents were just so awful.
So I don't want to name any names, but anybody in this space knows exactly who they are. And I felt with my experience in user experience and software development, I could bring something better to the market. We launched in 2016, and me being a technical founder in every stop previously, I was the CTO or some kind of engineering leader.
I quickly realized that I had zero idea on how to acquire customers. And so began this kind of slow trial from zero to a livable wage over the course of three and a half years, during which I got a full-time job as initially a software engineer and eventually a CTO of an e-commerce company in LA. And only in 2019, I started working full time on the business.
It was actually, it didn't feel quick to me. The last couple of years kind of went in a blur when we were growing pretty fast every year. But the first five were a slog for sure. Yeah.
Yeah, I was around 35K. And by the time the program started, already 40. And I remember having chats with some of the founders and the meetup we had in Arizona. And they're like, you're at 40K. Why did you join TinySeed? And I had a different calculation than them in my mind because I had the same kind of dilemma when I was thinking about applying. It's like, we're doing pretty well.
What can I get from TinySeed that I can't get by myself? And the framework that I use is if TinySeed helps increase the value of the company by more than the equity that they take, which was 10%, then it's worth it. And it ended up being... way worth it.
So I think in that regard, it doesn't matter that we were at 35 because we came in from maybe different reasons than some of the other companies in the batch.
A lot of it, well, it started with me following your content and startups for the rest of us, right? You know, I've talked to many investors. And I can tell when somebody actually knows what they're talking about. They're not just repeating stuff they read on somebody else's blog, listened to on a podcast. which is the case with a lot of the investors that I see.
And I was coming in to get that kind of advice one-on-one. This is my first company that I'm building Bootstrap. First company that I got to a certain scale that I haven't been able to at previous companies. And I'm going into a lot of uncharted territory. I remember that we had pricing realignment engagement together. Me and you sat together and talked it over.
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