Introducing Myself: Steve Lionais, Co-Founder of Dr. Bill

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#1

Hey community, I co-founded Dr. Bill with two technical partners in 2013 and we sold the business to RBC Ventures (subsidiary of RBC) in late 2019. I’ve been working for RBC just over a year now and will likely be with them for another 2 years.

We built Dr. Bill with some unconventional funding by raising a pseudo debt round from our customers which sat on our books as equity as well as standard debt instruments. I learned a lot from the process of talking to angels & VC’s and lenders and I think I have a decent grasp of different financing options available to startups, particularly the non-dilutive stuff. The short version is there’s lots of alternatives to traditional VC models and you’re only limited by your ability to be creative and ‘sell’ it.

I’m currently interested in several things which I’d like to incorporate into my next venture:

  • Micro SaaS business (<$5k MRR)
  • Boostrapping
  • Employee ownership and/or profit sharing

I think there’s a real power to controlling your own destiny and doing something unconventional because you believe in it.

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#2

Hey Steve (again!) Very curious about the “Employee ownership and/or profit sharing” model and have started having discussions around town / country who are approaching similar models. Would love to chat.

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#3

This is now a “Steve” forum :joy:

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#4

On a more serious note, Micro SaaS is pretty much what we want to enable with what we’re building at Fission https://fission.codes – an app publishing platform that eventually will have a majority of the “stack” that a developer needs, all the way up to users and payment.

I have a couple of micro saas articles bookmarked over in the Fission forum.

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