Episode 728 | Bootstrapping Gymdesk to a More Than $32.5M Exit
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It's startups for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. And this week, I talked to Iran Galperin, the founder of Gymdesk, about how he bootstrapped and frankly, mostly bootstrapped Gymdesk to a more than $32.5 million exit. It really is an incredible story of Iran launching this product on the side and working for years, nights and weekends, until it clicked. And this is a good example of if he had launched it and expected it to just work in a month or three months and was launching 10 things, Gym Desk would not be where it is today. It was the sheer focus and the relentless execution and showing up night after night, weekend after weekend, until he could quit his day job that got Jim Desk to such an incredible, life-changing, generational wealth-generating opportunity. I sometimes have tiny seed founders on this show, not because they are tiny seed founders, but because they have really interesting stories.
And most tiny seed founders are also part of the Startups for the Rest of Us and the MicroConf community, and Iran is no exception. I do ask Iran why he applied to TinySeed in this episode, and you'll hear his answer. If you feel like TinySeed could be a fit for you as a bootstrapped SaaS founder, head to tinyseed.com slash apply. We are opening applications for our fall batch within the next week, and that will run for about two weeks. If you hear this after September of 2024, you can always go to tinyc.com slash apply to get on our email list and learn about our next open enrollment. In addition, if you are an accredited investor and you're interested in investing in companies like Gymdesk, ambitious B2B bootstrapped SaaS founders, head to tinyc.com slash invest. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Iran. Hey, Ron Galperin. Welcome to the show. Hey, Rob. How's it going? It's good, man. It's been a long time coming. I'm glad to have you on here.
So folks have probably noticed from the title of this episode that you had a $32.5 million strategic growth investment from Five Elms Capital. And I want to start the show by asking you, what did it feel like that moment where you've refreshed your bank balance and you saw more zeros than you probably ever imagined that you would have?
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.
That's incredible. And did you like, had you been planning in your head of like, once I have this money, I'm going to do X, Y, Z with it? Or did you, did it just come in and you thought to yourself, well, this is it. I'm set for life at this point.
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.
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