Inside Outside

Mike McDerment is Co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, the world’s number one cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals. Mike talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about building and scaling a company, product development, and his free e-book called Breaking the Time Barrier. Mike built a simple tool to solve his accounting problem, and now 20 million people have used it. After building the first version,, Mike soon hired a software designer. They worked on the product for nine months, then added another co-founder and employees. The team valued the connection to their customers, always showing the product early in development. By understanding the market, the team knew what to build first. Bootstrapping the Company  - Raising capital is not success. A better strategy is to find customers and fund yourself - Over ten years, FreshBooks de-risked the market, product, team, and model.  - The first round of venture money was $30 million.  Obstacles and Things That Almost