If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Here’s yet another great case study of a successful bootstrapping whereby the entrepreneurs developed a solid product business eventually. This conversation with 2600Hz Co-CEO / Co-founder Patrick Sullivan took place in 2017. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Here’s yet another great case study of a successful bootstrapping whereby the entrepreneurs developed a solid product business eventually. This conversation with 2600Hz Co-CEO / Co-founder Patrick Sullivan took place in 2017. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are
Sramana Mitra: How much of your leads come from open source customers who have bought your core platform and then you get in and sell them applications? Patrick Sullivan: A lot of our leads come from word of mouth. It woulld usually be an engineer who works at one company and then transfers to another
Sramana Mitra: They take over the product roadmap and they don’t pay enough. You lose control of the process and become their outsourced development shop. Patrick Sullivan: That’s exactly what happens. When you’re stuck in the middle of it, you still get swayed by the brand recognition. That was the hard part. I remember five
Patrick Sullivan: It turns out our billing system was turned off. We couldn’t have figured that out because it was so complex at that time. It was one of those things where it was just an eye-opener. You were working on so many different projects at the same time that you always have to fundamentally
Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now? Patrick Sullivan: That was between 2009 and 2011. Around 2012, we had our first real working platform. We open sourced it. The reason for open sourcing it is, we thought, “If we try to push this out to the world, let’s give this out for free. If
Patrick Sullivan: We started going to a bunch of conferences and then we started explaining our vision on platforms. People started to listen. The next thing we know we started getting calls from people around the world. The problem was it was really hard to determine people who had money and interested versus people who
Patrick Sullivan: I worked in sales at Xerox. They have a world-class sales program. At the end of the day, I learned a ton about the business side. You get quite an education on how companies are built. You work with so many companies that you start to see how companies operate. I did that