Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have a wonderful positioning because anything that has a compliance angle to it has a very mission-critical purchase cycle. You must have experienced pretty high-velocity customer building. Sarva Srinivasan: That’s correct. In parallel, we started building EZOPS. As part of our engagement, we were talking with the clients and their challenges. Oftentimes,

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing this out of Chicago? Sarva Srinivasan: New Jersey. All three of us are from New Jersey. We started off in a small office back in January 2014. Sramana Mitra: All these 20 clients, you serviced with just the three of you?

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can either one of you summarize Bikram’s background? Sarva Srinivasan: Bikram spent most of his time in banking. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and then went on to work at McKinsey for a year or so. He then worked at Lehman, Goldman, and Citi. He comes from a background

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 1)

This is a text book case study of founders with deep domain knowledge in starting with services and then productizing, eventually raising institutional capital. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born? Where does your journey begin? 

Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing? Sameer Maggon: The first offering that we sold was for about $10,000 a year.  Sramana Mitra: How did that business ramp? When you start off with a bootstrapping with services model, your services revenues far outpace product revenues. Gradually, it starts to tilt.

Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What go-to-market strategy are you following? Is it a SaaS product that you go to market with? Sameer Maggon: SearchStax, at a high level, is a search company. We offer Search-as-a-Service. It’s a SaaS/PaaS offering that is provided for mid-market to large enterprises on a subscription basis.  Sramana Mitra: So it’s a SaaS

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Excellently navigated journey! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and in what kind of background? Sameer Maggon: I grew up in Delhi. I did my engineering in Computer Science from Pune. Then I

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That positioning is sharp and well-defined. Does that continue to be your sweet spot? James Cramer: It continues to be the biggest line share. It is where we focus the most. What we added that expanded our market was partnerships. We sought professional services automation platforms that targeted the same customers knowing that

Read Full Article »