He Bootstrapped A $40 Million Revenue-Generating SaaS And Cloud Spend Management Platform, Enabling Companies To Reduce Software Costs By Up To 35%
Entrepreneurship stories often follow a familiar script: raise venture capital, scale fast, chase growth, and exit. Andrew Alex took a different route—one that’s increasingly relevant in today’s market.
Instead of relying on institutional capital, he bootstrapped his way to building Spendbase into a $40M+ revenue business, guided by a simple but powerful principle: build products that deliver real value, and customers will sell them for you.
What makes Andrew’s journey especially compelling is not just the financial outcome, but the operating philosophy behind it.
From a Small Ukrainian Town to Global Ambitions
Andrew’s early life in Ukraine was far from glamorous. Growing up in a small town near Kyiv, viable opportunities were limited, and the environment lacked stimulation. He describes it bluntly: there simply wasn’t much to do. Everything changed when he moved to Kyiv.
The energy, the scale, and the exposure to a bigger world reshaped Andrew’s ambitions. But even then, he quickly realized that traditional education wasn’t aligned with his goals. He dropped out of university and started working early.
That early hustle at the postal office— packing and delivering parcels, riding through the city with headphones on—mattered. It wasn’t about the job itself; it was about developing independence, discipline, and an instinct for action over theory.
The Shift From Marketing to Product Thinking
Andrew’s first real career step was in product and marketing, working at MyWall, an advertising agency with major brands like MasterCard. It was a valuable experience—but also a frustrating one. He noticed something fundamental—marketing cannot fix a bad product.
You can push demand temporarily, but if the product doesn’t solve a real problem, growth doesn’t sustain. But if you make a product customers need, you don’t really need to do marketing. All you need to do is tell them about the product, and they will buy it.
That realization became a core principle in everything Andrew built afterward—don’t optimize messaging; optimize the value proposition to make customers come to you. This mindset later shaped Spendbase’s entire go-to-market strategy.
Learning Both Sides: B2B and B2C at Scale
His time at Conductor exposed Andrew to enterprise B2B—large contracts, long sales cycles, and slow product iteration. Conductor is a platform for search engine optimization for enterprises, and it gave him the opportunity to travel to New York, USA, for the first time.
Inspired by the spirit of entrepreneurship, the startups and founders, and the skyscrapers of New York, Andrew transitioned to B2C, running mobile products such as VPN apps with over 80 million users. The contrast was stark.
In B2B, you have high-value deals with check sizes of $100K, $500K, and higher. However, they also have slower feedback loops. But on the B2C side, Andrew encountered rapid experimentation, metric extraction, and data-driven decision-making.
This dual experience gave him a rare advantage—the ability to combine enterprise-level value creation working with large customers with SMEs and consumer-level speed and iteration. That combination became a defining edge later.
Timing the Market: Building a Recruitment Business During the Boom
In 2020, capital was abundant and offered at 0% interest. Companies were raising at extreme valuations in multiples of 100x and 150x, and hiring demand exploded. Andrew spotted the opportunity—the idea for Storypoint.
Instead of competing for capital, he built a recruitment business—essentially selling “shovels during a gold rush.” It worked initially, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Andrew realized he didn’t want to be in the services business forever. He wanted to build products.
In retrospect, Andrew considers his decision to redirect his energies to be timely. Although the company would still have been growing today, AI is transforming how companies recruit talent. Recruitment is a lucrative business with huge commissions, but only for executive-level hires now.
The Birth of Spendbase: Solving a Problem He Lived
The idea for Spendbase came from a frustration Andrew experienced firsthand. Companies were wasting massive amounts of money on unused subscriptions. Employees left, but the tools remained active, resulting in costs that accumulated silently. So he built a subscription management tool.
Andrew tested the tool on early adopters. But that wasn’t the real breakthrough. The real opportunity emerged when customers revealed a bigger problem. They weren’t just overspending on SaaS—they were overspending on cloud infrastructure.
That insight led to the evolution of Spendbase into a FinOps platform, helping companies optimize spend across AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and various local storage providers.
At the time, most startups and founders were raising capital, but Andrew didn’t really feel comfortable about fundraising just yet. He wanted the product to be successful, to be responsible for himself, and to prove its success.
With this objective in mind, Andrew bootstrapped the venture for the first two years, using funds from his earlier business, which he was gradually winding down.
The Business Model That Changed Everything
Instead of charging traditional SaaS fees and delivering zero value, Andrew made a contrarian move. He rejected subscription pricing for products that a majority of companies may not be using, but paying for anyway. Instead, Spendbase operates on a value-based pricing model.
Andrew strongly believes that when you deliver something, you should get paid only for the results. Thus, the company takes 25% of the savings it generates for customers. This aligns incentives perfectly. If customers don’t save money, Spendbase doesn’t get paid.
A pure performance-driven model, it forces discipline internally. As Andrew puts it, if they stop delivering value, revenue disappears immediately. He cites examples of AI tools experimenting with this pricing model, where users aren’t paying per API call but for the resolved ticket the API call created.
Why He Rejected Venture Capital
Despite building a fast-growing company, Andrew chose not to raise institutional VC funding—only a small friends-and-family SAFE of ~$1M. Spendbase was generating $40M+ in revenue, and when it raised a SAFE round, it had 50 employees.
Storytelling is everything that Andrew was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (<a href=" target="blank" rel="noopener">see it here</a>), where the most critical slides are highlighted.
Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.
Andrew’s reasoning is strategic. He wanted full control over the company’s direction without worrying about being kicked out. Further, he didn’t want pressure to exit based on 10-year fund timelines, and he wanted to build something long-term, not optimized for liquidity events.
Andrew acknowledges that venture capital drives innovation—especially in deep tech—but for his business model, independence was more valuable than speed.
The Reality of Bootstrapping: Discipline Over Optionality
Bootstrapping isn’t romantic; it’s operationally brutal. Andrew describes moments where cash flow was tight as vendor payments were delayed. Every product decision carries real risk, and that forces a different operating cadence. Each initiative must have a high probability of success (~70–80%).
When introducing a new product or feature, Andrew and his team needed to be 80% confident of its revenue-generating potential. They had to be cautious with the capital they invested, such as $100K or $200K, since there was no other source of funds. Unlike VC-backed startups, there’s no safety net.
As Andrew points out, founders today have several different sources of capital, such as venture-based credits, revenue-based financing, factoring, and more. This capital drives more revenue and has its own multiplier on the money.
Sales Mastery: From Introvert to Revenue Driver
One of the most important transformations in Andrew’s journey was personal. He started as someone uncomfortable with sales—more analytical, more product-focused. But bootstrapping forced a shift. No sales meant no business. Thus, he had to transition to mastering sales.
Over time, Andrew moved from avoiding customer conversations to spending 90% of his time selling. He altered his mathematical thinking and broke out of his comfort zone of numbers on the laptop. Eventually, he was balancing product and customer engagement.
Today, Andrew’s philosophy aligns closely with the Y Combinator mantra: Build and talk to customers. That’s it.
Turning Angry Customers Into Revenue
One of the most revealing stories from Andrew’s journey illustrates this perfectly. His team accidentally tried to recruit an employee from one of their own clients. A clear mistake—and a potentially damaging one. The client was understandably upset.
But instead of avoiding the situation, Andrew leaned into it. He addressed the issue directly and rebuilt trust in the conversation by focusing on understanding the client’s deeper needs. By the end of that same call, the client not only stayed but also purchased two additional products.
That moment captures a key entrepreneurial skill—the ability to convert tension into opportunity. And convert angry customers into upsells and new annual recurring revenue. Andrew also underscores the importance of efficient distribution as crucial for success.
The Future: AI Agents Replacing “Busy Work”
Andrew’s next focus is on building AI agents to automate routine business operations. The vision is ambitious but grounded. At present, Spendbase is recording employee workflows, identifying repeatable processes, and training AI agents to execute them automatically.
Initially, they feed all the available information to the AI, which transcribes it. Next, other AI agents make plans based on the transcription and work out what automation needs to do. Side by side, other engines implement the automations. The goal is to eliminate what he calls “monkey jobs.”
Jobs that are repetitive and monotonous, such as copy-pasting emails and passwords, entering data into Google Sheets, filling out vendor forms, and writing 150-page contracts. Andrew believes up to 80% of this work can be automated, freeing humans to focus on higher-value thinking.
Humans can thus spend more time interacting with customers to understand their experiences with the product and identify areas for improvement.
Lessons for Founders
Andrew’s journey challenges many default assumptions about building startups. Not every company needs venture capital. Not every product needs aggressive marketing. Not every growth strategy needs to burn cash.
What matters is alignment between product and real customer pain, pricing and delivered value, and execution and discipline. If there’s one takeaway, it’s this. The strongest businesses aren’t the ones that raise the most—they’re the ones that create undeniable value.
And when you get that right, even your most difficult customer conversations can turn into your biggest growth moments. At the same time, if a product idea isn’t worth it and has no takers, it’s advisable to stop wasting time on it and move on to experimenting with new concepts and markets.
Building products that deliver real value reduces the need for aggressive marketing and drives organic demand. · Bootstrapping forces discipline, where every decision must have a high probability of generating revenue. · Value-based pricing aligns incentives by tying revenue directly to customer outcomes. · Mastering sales is non-negotiable without an external capital buffer. · Combining B2B depth with B2C speed creates a powerful competitive advantage. · Handling difficult customer situations well can turn conflicts into expansion revenue. · The future of companies lies in automating repetitive work so humans can focus on higher-value thinking.
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker show. So today we have ah we have an awesome founder. You know, we have an awesome founder that, they you know, has done it all. But today, you know, ultimately the beauty is that he's more on the bootstrapping side of things. You know, more than the founders that we've had that are like, you know, raising crazy amounts of money and things like that. He took another route and they I think it's quite inspiring and we're going to be talking about all this stuff that they're rolling out, how they are like turning angry customers into buying more products. I mean, like like things like that. I mean, it's unbelievable. So quite the story. So brace yourself for an inspiring conversation ahead of us. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Andrew Alex. Welcome to the show.
Alejandro Cremades: So born you in Ukraine, a in a small city near Kiev. Give us a walk through memory lane. Andrew, how was life growing up for you?
Andrew Alex: Oh, like my my early life wasn't so fun, I would say, like, you know, like when you're like raised in the middle of like third world country. I love that my country, etc. But, you know, like the childhood wasn't so fun, you know, like living in like small city, there is like nothing to do. um so So, yeah, like the the most fun thing was like in in in the bigger city when I moved to the capital of of Kiev. like the The life there is much more fun.
Alejandro Cremades: I mean, you were there for about 10 years, but you were having quite the fun because you even decided to drop out of university. So why did you drop out of university? What was happening?
Andrew Alex: Well, like I made like my way, like at my second grade, I was working at the postal officer, packing packages for people and delivering like the parcels dotod door to door.
Andrew Alex: It was fun thing. like I love to like put my hands headsets on, like listening to music, just like when I was like biking through the city. But at the same time, you know like it's it's not something that you would do. And I ended up like building my career in marketing first. So I I found it more interesting to work for like a marketing agency than just like listening to six years old guys in the university. Unfortunately, the the education in Ukraine is like you have probably like two, three great universities and then the rest is just like post Soviet Union stuff, maybe some good math basics and some other, but more majority of the education in like non-tech field sucks.
Alejandro Cremades: Well, product and marketing ended up being the focus as part of your career before you got started with building your own stuff. So talk to us. Out of all things, what caught your attention you know when it came to product, marketing? How do you think it has really served you well you know later on?
Andrew Alex: Yeah, I started my career in advertisement agency. We were like doing ads for like big brands like mastercart um MasterCard and others. But you know i needed some more impact on the product itself. It's cool to make a marketing, but if you're like doing marketing for the product that people don't want, you cannot sell it. yeah like you You can sell to some percentage of that, but I saw that much better to make the product that people will allow. And then you don't need to really like do marketing. You just like need to tell them about the product and then naturally will they will buy it. And that's like the idea that I'm still having in my mind and I'm um um i'm still building all of the new products without the need to really sell them. Just like tell people about that, tell about the value prop and then they will naturally buy it.
Alejandro Cremades: So here you are, you know, you are in in the corporate world, you know, you are making a living, product marketing, as you were saying. How does all of that transition towards you becoming an entrepreneur?
Andrew Alex: Well, ah i was I was working for a company like I was doing the the marketing stuff. Then I got bored and I transitioned to the um company called Conductor. We were like doing a lot of a platform for search engine optimization for enterprises. It was a lot of fun. you know like It was my first time when traveled to New York, US. you know I was like 21 year old kid dreaming about the US.
Andrew Alex: the The first time I visited New York, it all of those skyscrapers, like there The spirit of entrepreneurship, all of those startups, founders inspired me. So i ended up being switched to B2C experience a little bit. So I was running like the, add that after the the VPN apps and for more than like 80 million users. So we were like doing a lot of like mobile apps.
Andrew Alex: That was totally different experience from B2B where in B2B you do like the check sizes of like 100K, 500K and the deals moving slowly, like the product is developing slowly, but on their B2C side, the it's totally different.
Andrew Alex: things that when you can run a lot of tests, i see the metrics, make a decision based on the data. So did this the experience is is totally like vice versa.
Andrew Alex: So I had like the best of two words, like working with big customers and working with like SMBs and just like consumers. um and And it helped me to build like the company into the ah future. um In 2020, it was a wild run of 0% interest rate. As you can ah remember, everybody was raising at the huge valuations, crazy multipliers of like 100x, 150x. So the money was not a thing at this time.
Andrew Alex: And that resulted in the booming of hiring, etc. And I ended up is like starting the recruitment agency. Everybody was wanted to hire talents. So essentially when everybody's digging for zo for gold, you need to sell showers. showers And ah yeah, and that was like fun for some period.
Andrew Alex: ah But then I got a little bit bored and wanted to launch products. ah And we ended up making a a tool for subscription management for companies.
Andrew Alex: That was like they're the thing that frustrated me in the previous work. you know like We had a lot of people leaving the companies and we still were like paying for tools that they were like having for like years, you know like literally not months, but years. um So, yeah, we made like the tool. ah It was quite successful. like we We tested it out with a small group of customers.
Andrew Alex: Everybody was raising at this point. And I don't know, I didn't feel comfortable to really raise some money for that in terms of... and I want this product to be successful and to be responsible for myself, firstly, and prove that I can do something.
Andrew Alex: So I was just like financing everything out of my pocket, essentially from the previous business. So previous business was refinancing that for like two for the first like two years, I think.
Andrew Alex: And I was g gradually winding down like the previous business because I didn't have time for that. If I had time, it would be growing, but still, you know, like right now, like AI is replacing most of the Employees and recruitment is not the best business to be right now. Maybe on the recruitment of the executive staff, I think that in executive staff, you can make good money, like huge commissions, etc.
Andrew Alex: um but So it was like ah good decision but back then. um So yeah, like for the first two years, it was financed from the previous business. And then we started ending up but like listening to customers solving their problems. And to be um we heard that a lot of our customers, they're overpaying for not only subscription, but only like for cloud. And we ended up like making a FinOps platform for um customers to save money on the cloud on major hyperscalers like GCP, AWS, Azure, and all other clouds as well as like Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, different local storages, etc.
Alejandro Cremades: So then obviously spend-based, it's what they it ended up really being a quite the hit you know for you as um as a founder. I guess for the people that are listening you know to really get it, what ended up being spend-based? What's the business model? How do you guys make money?
Andrew Alex: Oh, and that's ah that's ah it's a great question. So I was thinking like what I'm, you know, like there's like a famous quote of like,
Andrew Alex: Tell me one thing that everybody's wrong and you're right. And they saw that everybody's was having this like SaaS pricing in their products, like delivering like zero value. Like you just like signing up for the product that is not delivering you any kind of value for the year. Nobody from like your customer success team, like reaching out to customers. But at some point, you know, like they, they're forgetting about their subscription and for some reasons they renew, et cetera. And that's how majority of the companies are working.
Andrew Alex: But i like the idea of like, value-based pricing when you deliver something and get paid only for the results. Right now, there are like some companies that are implementing that, most of them experimenting. So if you're talking about the intercom, they have their own like new product theme that is helping to resolve tickets, pay per result ticket. I'm i'm not like sure completely because I'm not like a user, et cetera, but a lot of
Andrew Alex: AI tools right now are experimenting on this pricing when you're not like paying um per API call, but you're paying for the resolved ticket that this API call made or something like that.
Andrew Alex: ah So we ended up in the ah model where we take 25% of what we save for the customer. So that's like a win-win solution for us and the customer itself.
Andrew Alex: ah Yeah, and I think that it motivated us to bring values because if we stop giving value to our customers, they are stopping to pay us. And then we need to change something in the product and we need to change it quickly.
Alejandro Cremades: So I know SpendBase 2, I mean, the way that you guys have gone about this is really remarkable. You you haven't really taken any institutional money. I mean, you just say decided to take a friends and family safe, you know which was like about a million a million plus.
Alejandro Cremades: um And that's it. And now, you know, you guys have built this company, you know, that is 40 million plus in revenue with like, you know, I mean, when you did that safe, I mean you had 50 employees. I'm sure you have, you know, probably more. But why? Why not taking outside money from institutional investors? Why you taking this unique route to to building spend base?
Andrew Alex: Yeah, so my thoughts on this is that ah have like some vision to to build the company and I want to build something remarkable, something that is different from what all other companies are building. So like if they have like some VC playbook that is pushing them to do an exit because they need to close their 10-year fund or something like that, that is...
Andrew Alex: not the in situation when where I want to end up with and I also don't want to end up in situation where I kicked out of my own company or something like that. ah Those things are also happening. I think that the the fundraising is great and like the the VC money helps to drive a lot of innovation. As you can see, like from Anthropic Round, OpenAI, etc., there's like a huge
Andrew Alex: driven, I feel like new technologies, et cetera, but you need to know the funds very well. you know And I'm not like the person that was like in the VC world, like in the SF, knowing all of the VCs for like years and trusting them, etc. ah I'm just like a guy from the middle of Ukraine. you know So ah like our investors in Ukraine is a little bit different types. You know like you you can end up in the forest. you know like ah Dig in the grave, you know, like if you don't give them money back. So that's like ah some of the investors that you you can receive money from. but
Andrew Alex: Yeah, that's more like fun stuff. I think that things have changed. It was like 10, 15 years ago. ah But now we have good fans, more or less.
Alejandro Cremades: And now when it comes to, for example, the bootstrapping side of things, you know um because that's the way that you guys have been building this, what are perhaps, I mean, we we talked about the upsides, which is that you get to retain, you get to avoid the pressure if the a investor needs to liquidate to return back their money to their limited partners, to their investors.
Alejandro Cremades: Oh, for sure. This is everything. Distribution. Without distribution, there’s nothing. So I want to ask you this. Imagine you go to sleep tonight, Andrew, and you wake up in a world where the vision of SpendBase is fully realized. What does that world look like to you?
Andrew Alex: Well, I think we have our new product for AI agents for businesses to automate their day-to-day routines. Right now, what we are building internally is essentially recording all of the day-to-day flows that our employees have.
Andrew Alex: Then, from that, we are extracting the workflows they do. Then we are feeding all of that information to the AI, which transcribes it. Then there are other agents that make plans based on the transcription of what automation needs to be done. Then we have other engines implementing those automations. So we live in a world where people are not wasting their time on monkey jobs, you know, like when they
Andrew Alex: go to work each day, hate their job, and just need to copy and paste emails and passwords and all of those things into Google Sheets.
Andrew Alex: Or, for example, filling out all of those forms they need to fill out for vendors or writing 150-page contracts. Right now, I think 80% of that work should be automated. You just need to have a great vision of what your customer needs, talk to your customer all day, see why they are not satisfied, and figure out what we can do more in our product to meet their needs.
Alejandro Cremades: So we’re talking about the future here, but I want to talk about the past with a lens of reflection. Let’s say I bring you back in time to the moment when you were still doing product and marketing for other companies.
Alejandro Cremades: You have the opportunity to chat with that younger Andrew, and you can give that younger Andrew one piece of advice before launching a company. What would that be and why, given what you know now?
Andrew Alex: Yeah, I think the main thing is not to waste time on non-important things. Right now, from my experience, we are launching everything 10 times faster, etc. So, don’t pursue ideas that are not worth it. Don’t pursue super small things, like doing custom jobs for clients that don’t scale. You need to go after really big markets and big ideas. Life is too short to spend it on the wrong things. What is the worst thing that can happen? You launch something.
Andrew Alex: If you’re trying to launch something that solves a big problem and you fail, but you put in all your effort, you won’t feel bad. You’ll just say, “I tried my best. It didn’t work out. Now I can try new things.”
Alejandro Cremades: I love that. Andrew, for the people listening who would love to reach out, say hi, and learn more about SpendBase, what is the best way for them to do so?
Andrew Alex: I think you can message me at andrew@spendbase.co , or LinkedIn would be best. Andrew Alex on LinkedIn. Yeah, that’s true.
Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.
