Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 4)

Sramana: What specifically did he want built for $10,000?

Aydin Mirzaee: He wanted a system built for students to upload their business plans and presentations to a website for a business plan competition. The judges would be able to see the business plans and provide feedback and evaluation through the website. The website owner would then be able to see which business plans were the best and give them the award money. However, all students would be able to get feedback for their efforts.

Sramana: What was the profile of the customer?

Aydin Mirzaee: He was a tech-savvy professor who was running the entrepreneurship program at the university. He had funds that he would give out to students for winning business plan competitions every year.

He gave us the money, so we went out and hired two people for $15 an hour for 30 hours a week, when in reality they had to work 60. It took some convincing, but they bought into the vision. We actually hired three developers that way. There are four co-founders of FluidWare; the other two were students at that time and where helping out with the code on a part time basis.

We accepted the project, and we wrote the code to make the process work but it was hard-wired for that business plan competition project. It could not be used for anything else. It was not really a product, it was a project. We did feel that every university and city would have some sort of business plan competition so it would be something that we could turn into a product. We thought it would be a no-brainer, we would build the site and then turn around and sell thousands of them.

After we delivered the product, we realized that we had spent all of the money that he had given us, and that in order to turn what we delivered into a turnkey product, it was going to require a lot more work. We were not going to be able to do that before the money ran out. Then we had a “light bulb” moment.

While building that site we had created a form creation tool. It had a drag-and-drop interface that allowed you to create forms on the website. We built that because any student who was building their business plan for the presentation was going to need to be able to customize their forms. This was still during the early days of the Internet where a drag and drop interface in the browser was cool.

We realized that the form feature was very unique and that it was something that we could extract and sell as a product. We came up with the name FluidSurveys. We deployed the first version of FluidSurveys as its own product. We did zero market research to determine if there was a market; we just threw it out there in desperation. Today it is a profitable, revenue-generating business.

After we built the product, we went out and started talking to customers. They would compare us to various other products and ask us why we were so special, so we would show them the interface. We had a drag-and-drop interface that made everything look easy. They found it to be intriguing, but it was not enough to get people to drop their existing products. We needed a new angle because we were not going to displace existing tools.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
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