If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Steve, relates how the team has navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in
Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone? Neil Araujo: From a personal standpoint, the year I started iManage in 1995, I also applied to the Kellogg Business School because I never thought iMange would get off the ground. I thought of going to business school and getting an MBA. As iManage picked up steam, I
Katherine Kostereva: We do account-based marketing campaigns around those companies. As soon as we acquire the partner, we do onboarding processes. We invest in onboarding the partner and have them start developing the market. In some regions, we have unbelievable success. In South Africa, we have a partner who’s bringing several customers every month. Our
Sramana Mitra: How much did the first customers pay you to buy this software? Neil Araujo: What mattered for us at that point was that somebody was using it. They did pay us. It took two years. The second customer was more painful because it took six months. The story over there is you have
Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about organic growth versus financing. Is all the growth that you’ve achieved so far organic? Katherine Kostereva: It’s all organic. We never took loans and we never had investors. The approach is very simple. We reinvest everything we earn into our business. Nowadays, we have 700 people on board in
Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2012? Stephan Goss: We started hiring pretty extensively on the tech side. I think, by the end of 2012, we got up to about 12 people. The questions were just statically built. They weren’t optimized. There wasn’t anything about switching them around. We started hiring a lot of developers around that
Sramana Mitra: Did you get this off the ground with some funding or bootstrapping? How did you get going and who were the first customers? Neil Araujo: It was through a combination of primarily bootstrapping and some funding. It was very hard for us to raise money at that point in time, particularly in the
Sramana Mitra: When it came to a head-to-head with Microsoft, how did you win? Katherine Kostereva: I win against Microsoft now in America as well. First, what is the differentiator. The differentiator of BPMOnline is that it is built on BPM platform. Even mid-size companies who value Business Process Management as the core of CRM application