Sramana: What was your pitch to potential clients? Mark Organ: We can provide the best quality leads to your sales people, because those leads are already on your website and you just need to talk to them. Sramana: It is very easy to get people to talk to you when you give them that pitch.
Sramana Mitra: These are good examples of taking data and doing something interesting with it to produce actionable business value but it didn’t really cover multi-modal data. You say it was one of the issues that you’re trying to illustrate. Can we take a use case where there is actually multi-modal data involved? Naveen Sharma:
Sramana Mitra: You pay what percent as affiliate commission? David Sharpe: It’s not quite 100% commission because we’ve got merchant, accounting , and processing fees. The commission is between 90-94% for our core product lines. We’re doing a $12,500 event at the beginning of March. Clearly, there’s event cost for that but instead of paying
Sramana: What specifically did you do during the incubation process at Bain? What did you accomplish before you left to run Eloqua full time? Mark Organ: I focused on customer development. One of my co-founders, Steve Woods, was also at Bain and did a lot of coding. He was also on a lot of customer
Naveen Sharma: Our challenge is not the question of volume, it’s more of variety because if you look at our call center data for example, that’s primarily an audio-based database. If you look at transportation services, that’s primarily video-based data. If you look at our call centers, they’re also looking at social media data, which is
Sramana Mitra: What were the profiles of these people? Were they sales people? David Sharpe: Yes. Initially, we were looking to find people who would help us go out and promote our products and services. We went after salespeople, promoters, and marketers. Sramana Mitra: What did you tell them? What was the call to action
I have been having this discussion with a few people whose analysis of the venture capital industry I respect. The exercise is not just to assess who are the top investors, but more, to assess where the industry is going, and where the next generation of venture scale companies are going to come from. In
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Raised in an entrepreneurial home, Mark was encouraged to become a doctor or professor and delighted his parents when he went to Northwestern to earn his PhD in neurosciences. In no time he was incubating Eloqua from within Bain and Company during the Internet boom years.