Sramana Mitra: You started finding these use cases and segments as you launched in 2010. What did you learn about the business model and the pricing model? How did those decisions evolve and how did that turn into revenue? Josh Levy: It’s a good question. Subscription models have been around forever, but they’ve also gotten
We’ve covered several stories of tech startups in Utah. Convirza is yet another interesting company from the mini tech hub. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Jason Wells: I was born and raised in Fresno,
As a variation on our ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ theme, we also see many entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped a first company (or business), and then gone onto venture-fund a second. Christian Chabot built Tableau Software in this mode. Sridhar Vembu built Zoho. We have numerous examples of this tried and true path. Something to
Sramana Mitra: I’m interested in more granular information. Josh Levy: I think TV is a great example. In 2007 to 2010, television was cheap. The market and the economy were down. It was a great time for us to step in and grow the brand through television. At that time, we had been trying Facebook
Sramana Mitra: Why did you raise money? What was the thinking behind raising money? Manish Sood: The thinking behind raising money was that we had validated the opportunity and had substantial revenue was being generated, how do we accelerate? We are still dealing with enterprise customers. Some of these sales cycles can be long. At the
Sramana Mitra: You have a lot of customers. You said you have customers in 50 countries. Does that mean that you also have customers in accounts that could become much larger because you already had started penetrating these accounts? You have small footprints in those accounts that can be grown to much larger value accounts.
Sramana Mitra: What are the use cases? What are the drivers to want to subscribe to something like this? In my life, for instance, if I need to check somebody out, I go to LinkedIn and look at their profiles. Josh Levy: If I have to pick the hardest problem for BeenVerified, it’s that we
Sramana Mitra: That’s your experience. We work with a very large number of entrepreneurs. Not everybody comes from a company where they’ve already seen a problem unsolved and then they go after that. You had a lot of your validation and probing done while you were already at Siperian and Informatica. You built upon that