Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why do you need 300 people? The demand meant bigger server investment. Where does the people angle come in?

Erik Allebest: We take our customer support very seriously. We believe that taking care of our community is a big deal. When you have five times as many active users, you need five times as many support agents. We scaled up our support team significantly. Also, we’ve been adding to our international team significantly. The amount of content and translations require larger teams to translate and take care of all of the international growth.

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Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The main question I am asking is at what point did you start productizing?

Nitesh Chawla: We started thinking about it from a services perspective. One thing that’s true today is that in the mid-market, you must have a partnership services model attached to it. It needs human expertise along the way. Having said that, in about 2013 or 2014, we were doing our first demo of Aunsight 1.0. In 2013, we launched it. We came out with a data platform.

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Video FAQs

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the business model?

Erik Allebest: We didn’t know. At first, we thought we’d be selling ads against it. We quickly realized that it wasn’t going to pay for itself. Also, we didn’t love ads as users. But we had this content that we had bought along with the domain name called Chess Mentor. It was a teaching product. You would get a chessboard and you’d make a move. It’d tell you if it was good or bad, and why.

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Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that you said is early validation. If you look at our work, we use different kinds of bootstrapping techniques. One of them is Bootstrapping using Services. What you’re describing is exactly that, which is going to customers and taking services projects with a specific problem domain in mind. Then you productize based on a bunch of projects.

Nitesh Chawla: Yes. You can bleed yourself and take a bunch of capital. Then you’re raising capital and selling what you have built. The second thing that happened was there were a couple of clients who believed in us.

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Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Erik Allebest: I had an internship at a big tech company. I wasn’t that interested in it. Frankly, I did a bunch of internships while I was at Stanford. Pretty much every person I met with at every big company wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. None of them love their jobs. That’s the honest truth. They want to talk about what I had done as an entrepreneur, which I thought was weird. It made me realize I’m not cut out for big companies.