Fired from investment bank, this founder bootstrapped all the way to a $35M funding round

Earlier this year, Australian-based mobile invoicing company Invoice2go stunned the startup world when it raised a US$35 million in its first ever funding round. The company’s impressive numbers – such as having over A$10 billion (US$8.7 billion) in invoicing going through the app to date – had something to do with that.

But the more incredible feat is that the team’s enormous success came about even before founder Chris Strode decided to take a single cent of funding. To date, he has been bootstrapping Invoice2go’s operations for over 12 years.

Strode describes his team rather aptly as the ‘quiet achievers’. He reveals that they have always been profitable, in huge part because the app caught on quickly in app stores around the world.

“The fact that we were ranked highly in the app store meant we were selling to any small business right across the world – this helped us become profitable enough to build our team without external funding,” he recalls.

Invoice2go didn’t begin its life as a smartphone app, though. Back then, smartphones hadn’t even come into existence yet. However, the goal was the same for the one-man team of Strode: to create an easy-to-use and inexpensive invoicing product.

One man, one idea

At that time, Strode was running his own software development business, and was having trouble finding an invoicing tool that he could use. “I was looking for a simple, easy to use invoicing product […] The only thing I could find were big accounting software solutions, which were over-engineered and too expensive for my needs,” he recounts.

With this in mind, he decided to build one himself. Getting fired from investment bank Macquarie when he “had one too many drinks and overstepped the mark” during a work party meant he could devote most of his waking hours to this endeavor. On hindsight, he views it as a good thing: “It was the push I needed though – I’ve never looked back since then.”

Strode spent the subsequent years patiently developing a software product with the aim of being the best in the market for small business owners.

“It was originally a web app […] which allowed them to create and send their invoices easily, in much less time than it would take them if they used a word or excel template,” he recalls.

Careful with the dollars and cents

Even then, Strode was earning a tidy profit despite not being funded. Carefully managing costs and tapping on existing distribution channels, he explains, played a huge role in making that happen.

“In the early days, I could avoid big overheads by doing all the product development myself, and using the software distribution channels that were already in place,” he says. “Pre-mobile app days, we distributed our product as shareware to drive sales, while at the same time selling Invoice2go to micro businesses across several different countries.”