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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You bootstrapped? Justin Moore: Yes, we convinced the original equipment manufacturers to give us engineers. The logic I used with them was, “You’re not going to get your maintenance renewals on the equipment that you sold. That’s some of your highest margins. If we can get this deployed and get your full renewal
Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: How long did you persist in your first effort? Justin Moore: It was probably about a year and a half. While I was at school, it started consuming more and more of my time. Instead of doing homework, I was working on a company. That was when I decided to stop. Sramana Mitra:
Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Justin tried his hand in other businesses and never had the time to go back and finish his degree at Stanford. He learnt business on the job. Today, he has a thriving Disaster Recovery Cloud venture, for which he has raised over $60 million. The company
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You managed to get to $5 million in what time frame? Al Lalani: We’re past that stage now, but it took us about two to three years. Sramana Mitra: Who else in the competitive landscape was really giving you a hard time in deals in particular? Al Lalani: We were getting hit by the
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 4)
Al Lalani: The next phase of growth was primarily to scale some of the traditional SaaS channels. We hired an outbound marketing team to scale the people I hired from college and Craigslist. We created an inbound marketing team to do a lot of content marketing. If you look at our site, we’ve got really
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire customers? What was the pricing model that you were using? Al Lalani: It was, plain and simple, cold-calling for the most part. It was really focusing on the niche of e-commerce. Within that niche, we focused on the mid-market. These are customers between $2 million to $50 million in online
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 2)
Al Lalani: I had hired a few developers in my first startup. I didn’t know what to do when I was losing money every month. I wasn’t making much on the e-commerce side. A friend of mine said, “I’m in a little bit of a fix. We need to build this site. I have a budget
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We often get this question: how do you compete with a bootstrapped startup against heavily venture-funded competitors. We’ve done other stories on this topic. Here’s one that will give you additional perspective. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you