Today’s 209th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, March 20, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!
Sramana: Who were you going after in terms of clientele? Gaurav Khandelwal: In the beginning, I was going after companies that had an appetite for innovation. Primarily, they were small and medium businesses. I often ran into entrepreneurs who were looking to build their ideas into the next big thing. This was happening in 2008
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. John spent $200,000 to get to his first million in 18 months with GoGrid. One year from that, the company got to $5 million. Today, they are at over $50 million in revenue run-rate, all organically grown. Read John’s insights on a tightly managed entrepreneurial journey.
Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s like the 411 service in North America where people call to get services. In China, they have salesmen receiving the call. People call and say, “I’m looking for this.” The person receiving the call will not only give the information but also go and complete the sale. Azzimov is included in that. They
Sramana: What specifically did you do when you launched ChaiOne? Who was your first customer? Gaurav Khandelwal: I was dating a girl at the time who is now my wife. She was working at Microsoft and called me on a Friday night frantic. Her boss needed something done by Monday morning and it was something
But I would think that there’s tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to kickoff very specific use cases within an industry or between a couple of technologies and build complete solutions. For example, something around the idea of connecting SMS types of technologies to other forms of broad-based marketing such as email, analytics between SMS campaigns, and
Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well? Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that
Sramana: Paying off all of your college debt is not a bad exit from your first company! Gaurav Khandelwal: I agree that it was very timely. It also gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. After I graduated, I went to work for a consulting firm in New York. I quickly found out that I could