From Bootstrapped Beginnings to Users' Favorite Social CRM for Networking: The Trans‑Atlantic Rise of Vedran "Ved" Rasic

- Milana Zelen

At 3 a.m. on a chilly November morning in 2023, Vedran “Ved” Rasic hit Launch on Product Hunt from a borrowed desk in Ottawa, Canada. By sunrise, LeadDelta 3.0, his then‑18‑month‑old “social CRM for networking” used by high-growth teams worldwide, had rocketed to #1 Product of the Day for the third time. Only ten months earlier, LeadDelta was voted the number one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product of 2022, also known as the Golden Kitty Award on Product Hunt, the first Canadian startup to achieve such an award.

That overnight splash was a decade in the making. Rasic, who cut his entrepreneurial teeth between Belgrade and Toronto, first appeared on North American radars in 2018 when he co‑founded Autoklose, an email‑automation startup that bootstrapped to profitability before being acquired by Texas‑based VanillaSoft in late 2020.

The exit gave Rasic both capital and clout and a vantage point from which he noticed a new pain point: business professionals drowning in half-forgotten professional and LinkedIn connections they couldn’t actually use.

“LinkedIn is everyone’s Rolodex—but hardly anyone knows how to work that Rolodex,” he recalls in one of many candid podcast appearances.

Betting on “Social Capital”

Rasic’s answer was LeadDelta, which was launched fully publicly by early 2022. In plain sight yet self‑funded, the product amassed several thousand paying users in its first year and later secured an $800,000 pre‑seed round to speed up hiring in Belgrade and Toronto.

LeadDelta lets teams import and bring together their professional networks while deduplicating them simultaneously. Users can then apply tags, notes, tasks, set reminders, apply filters, and enrich each profile with a half-billion‑row data lake Rasic’s engineers stitched together from public sources, a quiet but radical shift from “system‑of‑record” CRMs to what he calls a “social capital graph.”

Operating Playbook: “Just ship it!”

Rasic’s hallmark is shipping in public. His personal Product Hunt profile lists more than a dozen launches—courses, templates, even a “Product Hunt Masterclass” that has guided other makers on how to ship their products to market fast.

The approach fuels an engaged user community that co‑designs features in public Slack channels and routinely promotes LeadDelta online.

He is praised for sharing in public and educating others on what it takes to be an entrepreneur. One of his popular posts talks about the life of a Chief Executive Officer under $10M annual revenue. It’s just five “simple” tasks:

1. Build the product, learn, and iterate fast
2. Drive growth and tell the world about it
3. Guard the cash like your life depends on it (because it does)
4. Win and keep the best talent for the phase you are in
5. “Survive” to tell the story

When you simplify it even more, it all comes down to one key performance indicator, which in a startup world is survival. Keep your head above water so you can swing for the fences again.

The Road Ahead

Rasic has already proven he can steer a self-funded (bootstrapped) venture to exit and rally global talent. His teams work in the US, Canada, Germany, and Serbia. He led cross-functional teams and remote-first teams around the globe.

LeadDelta’s next act is unapologetically ambitious: pivoting from a beloved single‑seat tool to a full‑blown business-ready platform. A new team tier soft‑launched in March 2025, and it lets companies pool their employees’ professional graphs and de‑duplicate overlaps with powerful network signals. Next up is surfacing warm paths into target accounts. Under the hood, Rasic’s engineers are expanding the enrichment engine and building powerful alliances.

Simultaneously, Rasic is driving the company to profitability and courting West Coast venture funds for a Series A that would open a San Francisco headquarters. “We’re not trying to replace any existing SaaS giant in the CRM space,” he says. “We’re trying to make every contact human again.” The line lands because Rasic has lived the alternative: faceless funnels that worked until they became unwanted spam.

Why Now?

The B2B software industry is undergoing a significant transformation. If the past decade of B2B software was about automating outbound spray‑and‑pray, the next decade, Rasic argues, will reward founders who help professionals nurture genuine relationships at scale. 

The expansion of AI agents, capable of interacting autonomously, further highlights the importance of this shift. As AI handles routine interactions, the premium placed on authentic human-to-human engagement will increase. Market analysis supports this perspective, with Gartner forecasting that the "relationship intelligence" sector will exceed $30 billion in annual expenditure by 2028. Evidence of this paradigm shift is already visible, as platforms like LeadDelta are rated higher than established competitors on significant review sites due to their focus on usability and relationship-building capabilities.

The Takeaway

In 2015, Vedran Rasic left a safe gig to chase a half‑formed idea about better sales emails. Ten years, one acquisition, and one SaaS of the Year Award later, he’s building tools that promise to declutter the professional Internet itself. For immigrant founders seeking a blueprint, Rasic offers proof that you can bootstrap in Belgrade, exit in Texas, and still end up reshaping how the Silicon Valley networks, one professional connection at a time.