Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So this brings us to what? Fall of 2021? Chris Sinkinson: Yes. Right after all that back to school stuff, Dave and I were completely exhausted and one of our biggest competitors out of the Boston area reached out to us. They had been noticing that we’d been winning some deals and we

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Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now, between when you started with your first client and as you went along, how long did it take you to get to $1 million ARR? Chris Sinkinson: As I’d mentioned, we charged a one time setup fee at the beginning. That hurt us a little bit. I would say it was around

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Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Double click down on pricing. Now that you are getting these inbound leads and it sounds like you are not having too much difficulty closing the accounts, what’s the pricing? Chris Sinkinson: We did start increasing pricing, but we were doing it wrong. We were charging an upfront setup fee and then a

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Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the timeline for when all this is happening? When did you start developing? When did you get it out there? When did you get this endorsement and this opportunity to be celebrated in front of all these universities? What is the timeline of when all this is happening?

Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you didn’t need to use the Twilio API or anything. It was getting the data straight directly off the smartphone. Chris Sinkinson: Yes. The smartphone geolocation data has latitude and longitude that we would send to a web-based dashboard. The campus security team had a map that showed a pin of where the

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Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the process of zeroing in on AppArmor. Chris Sinkinson: We often joke that if you want to start a business, you don’t need a great idea; you need ten great ideas because nine of them are probably going to fail. You might get one that actually works out and ends

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Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 1)

I always love Bootstrapping to Exit stories. Chris and his brother bootstrapped a wonderful startup and sold it for $40M. Read on for the nuances. Sramana Mitra: All right, Chris, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of backgrounds?

Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you discuss pricing for this K-12 data science training program? What kind of schools? Is this part of the curriculum now? Is data science being taught at a curriculum level? What’s the state of the union? Josh Jones: I’d be happy to go much, much deeper into this area because it’s a

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