categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
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
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to keep this bootstrapped until this point? Jagan Reddy: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What are your thoughts about that? You have a profitable structure. You must be getting tons of calls from investors, but it sounds like you have chosen not go in that direction. Jagan Reddy: We have spoken with
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: How did that revenue split between large enterprises and SMBs? Jagan Reddy: About 75% of revenue is from large enterprises. Sramana Mitra: You said you had to increase your marketing to get into the SMB customers. What did you do in terms of marketing? Jagan Reddy: It’s more outbound. The only trouble in
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You still had enough cash to go through this SaaS transition and finish it in 2012? Jagan Reddy: We started the transition in 2012. It was a major shift, so it was not going to happen within a year. It has taken us, at least, two years to do the transition. Sramana Mitra: So
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Awesome. Can you talk about cash flow in all this? The startup story is all about cash flow. How did you navigate your cash flow journey in all this? Jagan Reddy: I bootstrapped the company, and then we sustained the business with our own cash flow. We manage the business very lean, but