Sramana Mitra: What did you learn in your international expansion? Was there any particular geography that was adopting your technology faster than others? Robert Hoehn: On the marketing side, a lot of people shy away from it just because it’s hard work. It’s already hard to run a marketing campaign with SEO and demand generation.
Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers were you able to gather as paying customers to get to this million dollar annual revenue? Robert Hoehn: I think it was about 50 enterprise customers. Sramana Mitra: How were you selling? Were you selling on the phone? How were you going to market? Robert Hoehn: I did it
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 302nd FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, April 14, 2016, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any
Sramana Mitra: What was the financial framework of this government relationship? Robert Hoehn: Actially, we did most of it for free. Sramana Mitra: How were you getting by? How did you sustain the company? Robert Hoehn: We put a small cash infusion in to start off. We quickly pivoted to try to sell to enterprise customers
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make the next major strategic move and at what scale were you at that point? Robert Hoehn: Around late 2008, we were getting a lot of requests for the idea of having a comment in a survey that could be displayed to other survey respondents and they could
Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale are we talking? How many customers were you able to get? What pricing model were you using? What are some of the business metrics at the point at which you quit the job? Robert Hoehn: I apologize. It’s been a little while, so I don’t quite remember. The basic
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If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The Innovation Management software space is quite crowded. Ideascale has managed to carve out a niche. Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?