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
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What happened after you raised the $15 million? How did the business move? What were the strategic moves that you made to get to the next level? Josh McCarter: The major move that we made was, we started investing in sales and marketing. We started building out our team. We took on some larger contracts that,
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What did you have in place when you went to raise capital? Josh McCarter: We had a functioning framework of the software. We had about 700 customers and a team of about 30 people. It was, at least, beyond a prototype and proof of concept. The business was doing under $1 million in revenue. We had
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Josh McCarter: Around 2001. Sramana Mitra: What happened then? Josh McCarter: The company’s IPO was successful. After six years, I was looking to do something new. I went and joined a company called Spafinder. It was a travel-based magazine and was call center-oriented. We were trying to turn
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. In 2010, SaaS investors were less rigorous than they are today about unit economics. Josh managed to raise a $15 million Series A and acquired a significant runway to figure out the metrics of his SMB-focused SaaS business. Read more about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s
Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make that switch from going indirect to direct? Domingo Guerra: I think it was around 2013 when we were in front of a lot more customers. We started realizing that it is a new space that’s changing very quickly. It’s difficult to train a partner to sell something that’s
Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: By the time you got this term sheet, how many customers did you have? Domingo Guerra: We had about six or seven beta customers, but they weren’t paying yet. A lot of times, it’s like a chicken-and-egg thing. They want to go with you but they want you to get funding because they’re
Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Talk to us a little bit about your fundraising process? What proof points did you go to raise money with and whom did you raise money from? What was the rational for raising money and what were the circumstances in which you raised money? Domingo Guerra: We were pretty naive about fundraising. We
Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Who was the first customer that adopted your solution? Domingo Guerra: We had a lot of initial beta customers. Automotive companies were doing manual testing of apps, and we were helping them automate that. The first paying customer was one of the largest ad networks. When you play a game, for example, you