401: Vova Feldman — Mastering Entrepreneurship in the Payments Sector

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Vova Feldman of the merchant of record payment provider, Freemius. I've met Vova a lot of times over the last several couple of conferences I went to, and I thought it was time to bring him on the show and chat. We talk about how hard it is to run a business that deals with payments in a very competitive space, how to build a team, how to build a good team, and how to find the right people for the right jobs and dealing with those early hires that just didn't work out. We also talk about generating the energy to stay on course for many, many years, the choice between bootstrapping and raising capital, and how to be an involved founder still while giving space to your employees to do their best work. Let's dive in. Here's Vova. Vova, hi, and welcome to the show. You've been bootstrapping for ten years now. Now that is mighty impressive. Most people really don't make it anywhere. They give up after the first couple months, if not a couple weeks even if they don't see results. How did you stick around for this long? Yeah. It's a really great question. I think the first main reason for that is that I'm really excited about the problem that I'm solving. It's something that I personally faced. I built this micro SaaS in the past and tried to monetize that, joined with another guy. We spent, like, a year working on it. And in the end, we kind of discovered that, basically, the whole, like, monetization part of things is way more complex, time consuming than actually building the product. So that got me to this, like, realization that there is a bigger problem and something that I solved. So I was very passionate to basically take something that I face and try to bring it to the world. Another thing is focusing on the target audience that I personally relate with. It's like people like me. Right? So I know the language. I know the people. I like to hang with those people to, you know, have a beer and a conference together, chat about business challenges. So the problem in the audience are very close to my heart. Another thing is having a very big vision. I think that at least for me and I think many people who are, you know, founders, they're basically high achievers. They wanna do great things. And what really pushes them is constantly growing, learning new things, and building something bigger. And if your vision, mission is, like, quite small, you get to a certain point that you feel, okay. What's next? I don't know, like, whether you're growing or not. But in terms of, like, the product development, you feel that you kind of maxed out, and you have that each, okay. I wanna move to the next thing. So what …