Sramana Mitra: Who were the target audience for this product? David Stubenvoll: We wanted the interest and attention of consumers in order to sell advertising to various financial players. One of our biggest advertisers were mutual fund companies and brokers. Sramana Mitra: How did it ramp? How did you get the consumer base to attract
Sramana Mitra: After you moved to the Bay Area, what were the next major strategic moves? Philippe d’Offay: After moving to the Bay Area, we had a product that physicians were very happy with. We were cash flow positive for four straight years. I talked about almost being bankrupt when we were in Atlanta. The
Sramana Mitra: What year was this when you were the only employee? Chris Taylor: 2006. That’s how it started. For the first couple of years, I did a lot of different projects around the auto industry and also for a lot of startups out in the West Coast. Sramana Mitra: You were consulting at that
Sramana Mitra: What did Gulp do? David Stubenvoll: We were your very typical startup in that we wandered a little bit. We started out providing mutual fund information on the Internet. It blossomed into creating websites for mutual funds. We actually created a trading platform, and became one of the larger personal finance sites on
Sramana Mitra: What was the journey like in 2001 to 2007? It was slow as you are pointing out, but were you still getting customers? What was the sustaining strategy during that period? Philippe d’Offay: At that time in healthcare, the consolidation hadn’t quite begun. There was this very strong entrepreneurial spirit in healthcare. We were
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. You know that we believe in the Bootstrapping Using Services methodology quite firmly. Here’s yet another story of how and why it works. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Ups and downs, successes and failures, experiments and pivots – the stuff that make up a serial entrepreneur’s journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? David
Sramana Mitra: There a lot of people trying to do the solution that you’re describing – this central electronic health record of a patient. Can you help me understand when you started this company, what was the competitive landscape like, and how has that competitive landscape evolved over the years as you have been in this business?