Course Coupons to Help Build Your Career Lifeboat

In today’s technology economy, relying on a single paycheck has become increasingly risky. More professionals are recognizing the need to create a Career Lifeboat, which is a profitable side business that can provide financial stability, independence, and long-term options during periods of corporate uncertainty. To help professionals build that lifeboat, we have developed a wide

Read Full Article »

Startup Success Comes from Customers Not Speculators

I want to share with you an insight from running the 1Mby1M program since 2008. Over 700 free mentoring roundtables with over 300k entrepreneurs. Thousands of case studies of successful entrepreneurs – the who’s who of tech startups – through interview based methodology development. It is a complex exercise to give people a message that

Read Full Article »

Do Not Chase Investors Before Chasing Customers

Sridhar Vembu built Zoho with zero outside funding to a billion-dollar ARR SaaS company. I wrote the first piece ever written on him in 2007 in my Forbes column. No one had yet heard of Zoho. But VCs were already salivating. Sridhar validated my philosophy of how I advise startups when he came to see

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You said at the beginning of the interview that you were trying to make up for the margin gap in services companies with velocity. Did you succeed in doing that? In the ten years that you’ve been in business, did you succeed in growing at a very high velocity?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of enterprise conversational AI applications that you’re talking about are happening more on the customer end – customer service, sales, or customer relationship management. It’s not much on the finance end. So, you rightly point out that this is a more of an open area where you’re starting to see traction.

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you about the delivery side. So you and your friend Chandra started the business. How did you grow the implementation team?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you quantify what was happening in these accounts, you were landing the accounts with your ERP channel and partnership management expertise and then growing those accounts. So, when you landed those accounts, what were the deal sizes and what kind of deal sizes were you able to expand these accounts to?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In this niche, did you have customer relationships? Anji Maram: Yes. Especially in the Bay Area, there were several customers who needed this business process to be implemented. Due to my consulting experience and my prior company’s experience, we already had a trusted relationship with the industry.