1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in SaaS companies finding growth strategies? What are the primary customer acquisition channels that are producing really well?

Tea Hea Nahm: Whether you’re using product-led, outbound, or inbound, we just want to have one that we feel is really going to work for them.

Sramana Mitra: Are you seeing any of them coming up repeatedly? At one point, Google search was a big one. Now Google search has become very expensive. I’m hearing less of the Google search growth. I do hear a lot of inbound content marketing and capturing organic traffic.

Featured Videos

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big is this segment you’re catering to?

Brian Cox: I always say a third of the country. Miami Herald did an article this year talking about the impact of the infrastructure bill. There are a couple of programs that are based on income level qualifiers. One of those is the affordable connectivity program which is how we provide the majority of our broadband. They did some math and found that 6.4 million households in Florida qualified for this program.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you read the open source trend? The commercial open source trend has also been going gangbusters. A lot of interesting companies have come up with that trend. What are you seeing in your deal flow?

Tea Hea Nahm: Open source is great. You’ve got Databricks and others. Customers like open source. You want to go with what customers like. The challenge is, if it’s open source, how do you compete with your competitors especially if a big platform decides to adopt the open source? That’s what we look at. We like open source as long as we believe that the company could still have a differentiated position that will generate meaningful business for them.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the gating items on the education side? What are the needs of this community on education?

Brian Cox: It’s funny you ask that, but that thought had crossed my mind. I have two sons in high school. I was thinking about education and how boring school is sometimes but how interesting learning is. We were talking this morning about how I took three years of a language. I got an app now where I’ve learned more Spanish than I ever learned in school because it’s fun. Fun is functional.

Cloud Stocks: Analysis of Smartsheet’s Outfit Acquisition

According to a recent report, the global enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow 12% annually over the next few years to reach $101.7 billion by 2028. Smartsheet (Nasdaq: SMAR) recently announced its quarterly results that outpaced market expectations.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Waveform to $8M

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

Waveform CEO Sina Khanifar started tinkering with bootstrapped entrepreneurship way back in college. When we spoke in 2020, this had certainly paid off.

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

Sina Khanifar: I was born in Iran. We moved to the UK when I was one. My parents did their PhDs in the UK. After they returned to Iran, the war broke out. They thought the best choice would be to go back to the UK. They ended up not returning.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You are comfortable investing in the nuances of SaaS, AI, AI for X. How about two trends that have come on my radar? PaaS for instance. There is a vertical SaaS trend that is going gangbusters right now. You find industry verticals where you have opportunities to do cloud and AI. You have interesting workflow automation and data-based solutions.

You touched upon horizontal AI not being as big of an interesting area for you. If you remember, Salesforce started off with a very niche solution although in a big market. Then they also opened up their platform. They have spawned a lot of companies including some large players like the Veeva’s of the world. These are unicorns that are built on top of Salesforce.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have come this far and you are in 8,000 stores, and you have done it with commission reps.

Brian Cox: Yes, and by finding smaller companies that have plateaued. We were able to acquire them and rebrand them. It doesn’t matter what kind of services you’re giving that clerk behind the counter if he doesn’t realize that this is more convenient.

Sramana Mitra: Aside from wireless prepaid and you talking about broadband wireless, do you have other products that you sell?