Stephan Schambach is a true serial entrepreneur. He has started, scaled and exited several ventures. He has raised millions of dollars in the process. He’s managed them through some of the roughest economic periods most of us have seen in our lifetimes. In our time together on the Dealmakers Podcast, we talked about making it through the tough years, when and who to raise funds from, his
00M hobby business, and the post coronavirus business landscape.
After years of being the poster boy for the anti-VC movement, Mike McDerment has raised millions to provide one of the most important services needed by countless small business owners and other entrepreneurs in the wake of COVID-19.
Mike McDerment knows how to run a lean business and face challenging times as an entrepreneur. He bootstrapped his venture for years before accepting institutional capital. His business may be one of the best positioned to survive and thrive during the 2020 pandemic and its aftermath.
During our time together on the DealMakers podcast, he talked about surviving 2008, why you should leave room for Q&A when pitching investors, and finding and keeping product-market fit.
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Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.
Here is the content that we will cover in this post. Let’s get started.
- 1. Toronto Roots
- 2. Market Research & Product Market Fit
- 3. Bootstrapping Versus Getting Funded
- 4. Navigating Tougher Economic Times
Toronto Roots
McDerment was born in and still lives in Toronto, Canada today. His father was a corporate lawyer. His mother was somewhat of an entrepreneur herself. Despite being at home and taking care of Mike and his three older siblings, she was always engaging in projects.
Her passion was charity, nonprofits and helping others. One of the programs she initiated brought together corporations and job seekers and helped prepare workers with everything they needed to get work. She would help them with the clothes, interview prep and resume writing.
For undergrad, Mike went to Queen’s University to study business. He got the chance to do an exchange program in Germany, and then University in British Columbia.
He started playing around with some entrepreneurial adventures himself. One of those was a frisbee tournament for 600 participants.
To pull off this event he taught himself how to build a web page. Other people started asking him to do theirs. That turned into a small web design service.
Then he realized he needed to actually get traffic to his website to make it work. So, he began learning internet marketing. He got the traffic, and then realized he needed to learn conversion skills. He was offering these services to others too.
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