Adrian Balcan is the founder and Managing Director of FeedCheck, a product reviews management solution for international brands. He has 10 years of experience in entrepreneurship, with a background in early-stage tech companies that build web products.

Personal Context

I was born in Pitești right during the Revolution (on December 24, 1889). Like most people in Romania, I come from a modest family. I grew up during the post-Revolution years when the local economy was highly unstable. My parents are very hardworking people who held jobs during the week and helped my grandparents with farm work on weekends.

How I Started

I saw my first computer at the age of 7 at a bank headquarters, being used by a secretary. I remember struggling to understand the difference between a left-click and a right-click. At age 9, I joined the computer club at the Children’s Palace in Pitești, where I learned to program in QBasic (creating programs that drew various shapes on the screen).

As I grew older and got my first computer at home, I became fascinated by the mechanisms behind them, the applications I saw on the screen, and how I could build some myself. I was also fascinated by the concept of scalability, building an application once and selling it to an unlimited number of users.

Later on, I attended a math-informatics high school and went to a university that combined computer science with economics. During college, I worked at eMAG and lived in the student dorms. This allowed me to save up financial resources that proved to be of great help later on.

At the end of university, I built a website and started creating small, free data processing tools, which I published online. I began getting contacted through the website’s contact form by various clients from the US who needed more advanced solutions, and I started helping them. I founded my first company on January 31, 2014, during the second year of my master’s program.

The First Product

Even before starting the company, I wanted to develop digital products. I created several product prototypes but ended up only selling services built around them.

Our first actual product was a data processing tool that we used internally, delivering only the final output to clients. In the early years, revenues fluctuated wildly from month to month. I remember we even had a month with 0 revenue. That was the turning point when we decided to pivot and build a SaaS product.

In 2015, we developed a price intelligence technology that was licensed to the largest company in the industry in Europe. It was a milestone that stabilized us financially, but it helped me even more psychologically. I saw that what I had dreamed of many years before was actually possible.

In 2016, we created FeedCheck, a product that helps brands monitor reviews. I have written in detail about the FeedCheck story here.

After nearly a year, our first paying clients started coming in. The first client paid a $5 monthly subscription, and the team consisted of 3 members. A rather stressful period followed, during which we added new features to the product weekly, yet revenues grew very slowly. Most of the time, our new clients were major brands that we saw on store shelves, and this gave us the confidence and motivation to keep going.

How the Business Was Funded

Today, most tech businesses we read about are funded by investors. When we started, opportunities to secure investment were very scarce, so one of our few options was to grow bootstrapped (using our own resources, using money I had mostly saved up during college).

People Who Inspired Me

One of the people who inspired me greatly was Radu Georgescu. I remember that right after starting the business, I managed to get a meeting with Radu. At the time, I was deeply impressed by how open people in the industry were and that, even though I was only 20 years old, I was taken seriously. It was a moment that motivated me immensely.

Along the way, there were many other people in the entrepreneurial ecosystem who helped us a lot and to whom I am grateful. People like Vladimir Oane, who had a business in MarTech (UberVU), and Bogdan Ripa stood by us whenever we had questions or faced situations where we lacked experience.

We learned from them how to build a pitch deck, how M&A discussions are handled, and how to structure our thoughts and look at our business from multiple angles. All these discussions helped develop my critical thinking and negotiation skills.

Where We Are Today

We are a small team of fewer than 10 people, but we help major Fortune 500 brands (such as P&G, Nestle, Fujitsu, and others). FeedCheck remains our main product, serving clients worldwide and generating $200K ARR. The latest brands we have added to our portfolio are Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. We have grown organically so far, and I believe this has given us greater resilience during tough times.

The way we work allows us to explore and create new products. Over these 10 years, we have started 9 digital products, of which 5 lost money, 2 broke even, and another 2 were profitable. Fortunately, the 2 profitable projects covered the losses from the rest.

Today, we are working on a new product in the Business Intelligence space to solve a need we discovered among FeedCheck clients.

Interactions with Investors

After FeedCheck acquired its first clients, we had several interactions with investors, but the seed investment scene was not very well represented in Bucharest back in 2016-2017. We didn’t have a very clear prediction along the lines of “for every $1 invested, we will return x dollars to investors,” which is what funds expected. We were in a phase of exploration typical of startups.

That was also when we learned about the arithmetic and terms behind investments, such as liquidation preference and other clauses designed to protect investors, which can often put entrepreneurs at a disadvantage.

Interaction with the State

Throughout this time, I have interacted quite a bit with state institutions (the Trade Register, ANAF, AJOFM), but the experience has been positive. People wanted to help me, and I managed to resolve all situations. Sometimes they even called to notify me that certain documents were about to expire and needed to be renewed.

What I Have Learned Over Time

• Timing for Bootstrapping: There are a few moments in life when you can start a bootstrapped business. One is right after finishing your studies, when your family doesn’t depend on you and you don’t depend on anyone else. Your main contribution is energy. Another moment is in the second half of life, when your children no longer depend on you. Then, your contribution is financial and knowledge-based.
• The Illusion of Simplicity: Seemingly easy things can be incredibly difficult due to competition. I was often drawn to projects that seemed easy to implement technically, but most of them brought in no money. Paradoxically, the projects that seemed hard to build turned out to be profitable.
• Mind the Gap: I learned that with a technical background, when starting something new, it is better to worry about the business side (and vice versa for people with a business background).
• Adaptability Over Prediction: I believe that although making predictions is appealing, we are often very poor at it. It is better to adapt to different situations than to try to guess the future.

What Motivates Me

One of the things that motivates me heavily is the quality of people in the Romanian tech business scene. During times of financial difficulty, this mattered a lot and gave me the energy to push forward.

Another powerful motivator has been the major brands that trusted us and had the courage to buy technology built by us in a small office in Bucharest.

Let’s start with the beginning. In 2012 when I was a student, I built a simple tool which at that time was discovering structured text on the Internet. Later, in 2014 I was founding a company called TheWebMiner, that offered data acquisition solutions to businesses around the world. In this context, we interacted with a lot of businesses.

In 2016, among others, we started to collaborate with a small company called Vector Watch, later acquired by Fitbit. Vector Watch was building a smartwatch and their watch streamed data from the Internet like the temperature in a certain city. We helped them acquire this data in real-time. After a while, their watch was distributed over a lot of channels like amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, bestbuy.com, etc. and they faced a new problem. Their customers were leaving reviews in all these channels and they wanted to keep in touch with all of their customers which offered feedback. We started to build an app that aggregates reviews from multiple sources to their help. After we built a proof of concept we received positive feedback but they were our only customer.

We were iterating and adding new features every week. In parallel, we started to make customer interviews and we contacted a few consumer electronics brands in order to better understand their needs. In the meantime, we tried many ways to acquire customers using ads on LinkedIn, Adwords, and even Facebook ads targeted specifically on employees of consumer products companies. All those efforts with no result at the time. Meanwhile, the expenses of Vector Watch were locked by their investors and we remained with a product and no paying customers. After 6 months of struggle, we got a customer who paid 5 dollars per month for our service, as a result of our SEO efforts.

After those very hard times, we started to be contacted by other customers and our confidence started to increase. We had a recommendation to join a local accelerator program called MVP Academy and we joined. During the program, new questions that arrived on our table. We continued to iterate our product and increased our network in order to increase the customer base. Also at that time, a new member joined our team to help us with the business side. We started to handle every question arrived and this increased the number of interviews with people from the industry. Popular brands like Epson, Fujitsu, etc. started to come and our revenue grew.

Until now the journey was full of emotions and surprises and I am sure that this will continue to be an exciting experience.

How we built an app that manages reviews for popular consumer brands was originally published in FeedCheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.