“It’s amazing we survived”: Collabosaurus founder Jessica Ruhfus on bootstrapping, scaling and sleeping on the floor

In 2015, Jessica Ruhfus was back living with her parents, sleeping on her sister’s bedroom floor and working three jobs just to keep her business collaboration startup Collabosaurus off the ground.

Five years later, she’s busy drumming up support for her first capital raise and getting ready to jet off to San Francisco, where she will take up a three-month residency at the AusTrade Landing Pad in San Francisco.

Collabosaurus has facilitated more than 4000 collaboration opportunities, and the business saw core revenue growth of 206% in the 2015-16 financial year and 108% in 2016-17.

To the untrained eye it might seem like Ruhfus has made a seamless transition from marketing pro to startup founder on the cusp of international growth; as we know, other people make success look easy.

But the story of how she got there is much more complicated than that, with plenty of unique and not-so-unique challenges along the way. And the journey is not over yet.

A matchmaking platform for brands and businesses, designed to make collaboration easier, Collabosaurus launched in January 2015, to an original target market of publicists and marketers. Read more

Stephanie Palmer-Derrien - Smart Company - 3 Aug 2018