Sramana Mitra: Double click down on pricing. Now that you are getting these inbound leads and it sounds like you are not having too much difficulty closing the accounts, what’s the pricing? Chris Sinkinson: We did start increasing pricing, but we were doing it wrong. We were charging an upfront setup fee and then a
Sramana Mitra: What is the timeline for when all this is happening? When did you start developing? When did you get it out there? When did you get this endorsement and this opportunity to be celebrated in front of all these universities? What is the timeline of when all this is happening?
Sramana Mitra: So you didn’t need to use the Twilio API or anything. It was getting the data straight directly off the smartphone. Chris Sinkinson: Yes. The smartphone geolocation data has latitude and longitude that we would send to a web-based dashboard. The campus security team had a map that showed a pin of where the
Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the process of zeroing in on AppArmor. Chris Sinkinson: We often joke that if you want to start a business, you don’t need a great idea; you need ten great ideas because nine of them are probably going to fail. You might get one that actually works out and ends
I always love Bootstrapping to Exit stories. Chris and his brother bootstrapped a wonderful startup and sold it for $40M. Read on for the nuances. Sramana Mitra: All right, Chris, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of backgrounds?
Sramana Mitra: Can you discuss pricing for this K-12 data science training program? What kind of schools? Is this part of the curriculum now? Is data science being taught at a curriculum level? What’s the state of the union? Josh Jones: I’d be happy to go much, much deeper into this area because it’s a
Sramana Mitra: How did you engineer your go-to-market organization to sell large deals to enterprises? Josh Jones: We sell all the way down to a company hiring a single person. In fact, in our base level offering, you can get free tests. You start paying when you need larger volume and a single sign-on. A
Sramana Mitra: So who were these corporate customers? The corporate customers were not for this hiring interviewing tool. Then, you were selling something else besides this product, right? Josh Jones: Yes, we had a number of customers that we talked to that expressed interest. The first interesting customer was one of the largest consulting firms