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Sramana Mitra: So it took you four or five years of bootstrapped business building – building the product, getting the POCs going and so forth to get to $1 million ARR. How many POC customers or the $60,000 ARR kind of range customers did you have in the pipeline when you went out to raise that first round of financing?
Sean Minter: We probably had ten to twelve clients at that point of time.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on that phase. I just want to go from that zero to $1 million ARR phase. Where did the customers come from and were you building the product with customers or did you build something and then go to customers, how did you navigate that first phase?
Sean Minter: I had a good idea of what was needed because I would have been a customer. We built most of it on my vision of was needed in the market. There was no customer involved. But for any B to B business, the only way to get your initial customers is through relationships. To be honest with you, it’s hard. That’s why it’s always good to have experience working in an industry if you’re going to do B to B.
>>>Enterprise services provider Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) recently announced its first quarter results that surpassed market expectations. Due to the macro conditions, Workday reduced its subscription outlook for the year, sending the stock falling 11% in the after-hours trading session.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What were the highlights of that journey? How long did you do it for? How big did it get and what happened to it?
Sean Minter: That company got to about $5 million in revenue. We actually sold it to a larger telecom entity called Birch Telecom.
>>>Sean has bootstrapped AmplifAI to $1M, and then raised over $15M in two rounds of financing. Read on to learn the nuances of his strategy and execution.
>>>This feature from Forbes covers the highlights of the Worldwide Developers Conference last week where Apple unveiled its own GenAI vision among other things. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
>>>I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Tranquility I
Tranquility I | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Pastel, Ink | 8 x 8, On Paper