Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the skillset of that employee that you brought in?

Peter Ord: He was a fellow sales leader. I was supporting the product.

Sramana Mitra: The agency that you were working with was maintaining the product.

Peter Ord: Right. We were selling and getting more customers. Todd, who was that first employee, came to me and said, “I don’t have the time to support this. I can’t handle these calls. We need to find an operations person.” That’s when I hired my third employee in December of 2018. He’s won CEO of the Year from Silicon Slopes in Utah.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christopher Mirabile, Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what you’re seeing in your deal flow as well as in your portfolio in terms of interesting trends. Early-stage deal flow is indicative of what’s happening in the pipeline of technology and interesting developments. What are you seeing? What’s interesting?

Christopher Mirabile: Asset prices are stupid right now. That’s difficult because doing the kind of investing you and I do, you have to be disciplined about price and about staging capital. Those are difficult circumstances. I feel like there’s a lot of hype about crypto. We’re not paying much attention to that. I’m sure that’s going to be an important technology down the road, but that’s not the focus for us.

Video FAQs

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who was going to build the product? You are not a technical person, right?

Peter Ord: I sent my resignation to my boss when I was on vacation. Part of the reason was, I had gotten a number of calls from car dealers who were upset with the implementation during my vacation. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My wife was still frustrated that I went downstairs, got white paper from the business office, and I just stayed upstairs in the hotel room the whole day just mocking out what the system should look like.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christopher Mirabile, Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: To be able to get to $20 million with $1.4 million, you have to bootstrap. That’s something we believe in and promote extensively. We are with you on this line of thinking. Like you said, these large funds can only invest large amounts of money. Otherwise, their human capital-to-capital ratio doesn’t work out.

Christopher Mirabile: They just can’t manage that many deals. It’s interesting. You read about large exits all the time. You think they grow on trees. There are a couple of dozen billion-dollar startup exits at most from 400,000 to 500,000 startups created in the US each year. Pushing an entrepreneur to a high-capital, big exit path is, statistically speaking, dooming him to failure.

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Abinash Saikia, Co-founder of EnCloudEn and former 1Mby1M Premium member, has successfully bootstrapped his venture to an exit and discusses the process in great depth.

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Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you joined the company where they were going to do homebuilder, but then the company imploded. Did you talk about one or two companies?

Peter Ord: One company. The company I joined had a product that catered to automotive dealers. They also aspired to build a similar product for homebuilders.

Sramana Mitra: That automotive product did work. In that implementation, you learned that the implementation was cumbersome and complex. Is that what you’re saying?

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