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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
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 7)
Robert Hoehn: Just to circle back to the competitive advantage, another one is data. Early on, we took the stance that we don’t want to charge volume-based pricing, which is against the grain for enterprise software. Most people are looking at it and saying, “Enterprise CIOs expect to pay per seat.” We’re afraid that customers
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What did you learn in your international expansion? Was there any particular geography that was adopting your technology faster than others? Robert Hoehn: On the marketing side, a lot of people shy away from it just because it’s hard work. It’s already hard to run a marketing campaign with SEO and demand generation.
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers were you able to gather as paying customers to get to this million dollar annual revenue? Robert Hoehn: I think it was about 50 enterprise customers. Sramana Mitra: How were you selling? Were you selling on the phone? How were you going to market? Robert Hoehn: I did it
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the financial framework of this government relationship? Robert Hoehn: Actially, we did most of it for free. Sramana Mitra: How were you getting by? How did you sustain the company? Robert Hoehn: We put a small cash infusion in to start off. We quickly pivoted to try to sell to enterprise customers
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make the next major strategic move and at what scale were you at that point? Robert Hoehn: Around late 2008, we were getting a lot of requests for the idea of having a comment in a survey that could be displayed to other survey respondents and they could
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The Innovation Management software space is quite crowded. Ideascale has managed to carve out a niche. Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a couple of questions in terms of the process of building this company. In this journey, what are some of the most important strategic moves that you’ve made? Sam Wolf: One of the most important strategic moves is to really understand who our customer is and what’s important to
Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Help me understand what kind of ramp you saw from the point where things started finding their stride. What kind of growth have you seen? Sam Wolf: The business has been through an evolution. We’re now 10 years old and our 11th anniversary is coming up. There’s over 200 people involved in the