Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrapped with Angel Money

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Building businesses has become cheaper by several orders of magnitude. When we spoke in 2015, Co-founder Josh Levy and his team took just over $2 million in angel financing, and had built a profitable business in New York. For those entrepreneurs facing the Series A crunch, this is an important story to follow. You will do fine if you have patient angels, and just use their investment to bootstrap to profitability.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Josh Levy: I was born in New Jersey. I went to high school in New Jersey. I went to the University of Maryland for college where I got an undergraduate degree in Finance. I also did a minor in entrepreneurship. I now live in Brooklyn. BeenVerified is headquartered in New York City. I’ve been on the East Coast my whole life.

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Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of conversion rates were you seeing from free to premium?

Chris Lu: We got a lot of people who are international and who aren’t able to pay $49 a month. If you filter it down to the core markets – US, Canada, Australia, UK – it looks like a normal SaaS conversion metric.

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you offer?

Chris Lu: When we first started, we were more of a copywriting app. We help write your email copy or sales copy. However, that has transformed over the years. Our entire vision has always been the business’ business. How do we become the product that helps your business assemble and run itself?

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Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 1)

Chris and Paul have built a front-end to Open AI and a significant business with over $10M in revenue. Now, they’re broadening their product capability to business workflows. We also discuss ideas and opportunities for new entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

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Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It seems like Microsoft, AWS, Google will create sophisticated AI-optimized cloud environments. These environments are going to be so advanced that you would be hard-pressed to argue against using one of those.

Volker Smid: The other aspect is if you have the system on-premise, it’s hard to be connected to external services. All the advantage of this connected infrastructure goes away if you deploy on-premise. There’s still sensitivity and concerns around security of cloud. There are European customers who don’t want to use a service that is hosted by companies that sit in the US because of information security.

Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From your product roadmap point of view, you operate in the post-content production scenario mostly, right? You’re looking at content and governing content. You’re not involved in the production piece.

Volker Smid: We are also involved in the content production piece because we provide the side bar for the authoring environment. When an author creates a piece of content, we have a side bar that is connected to the enterprise so that you can create content following the rules of the enterprise. We are connected to the production piece as well.

Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The objective is learning. What your technology is doing is, it’s streamlining that learning.

Volker Smid: By helping the author to align the content with the objective. The objective is learning. You need to use technical, simplified English. The content needs to be measured against clarity. Sometimes it’s as easy as saying you can’t use long sentences. The assistance of the authoring environment is one aspect.