Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now? Carl Mazzanti: We’ve been in the middle of the pack of the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies for the last five years. We hit $7 million in 2014 and we’re on track for revenue between $9 and $10 million this year. If we continue this for the next 15 years
Sramana Mitra: What did you do with that? What was the next milestone after you got that money? Tim Hentschel: We just used it for growth. We eventually bought our own office space in San Diego and started hiring some people. Sramana Mitra: Why would you buy office space? Tim Hentschel: There was a real estate
Sramana Mitra: Your thesis on it was that it had to be manually kept up to speed? Rakesh Gupta: No, not manually. It has to be efficiently collected but certainly not in the fashion of crowdsourcing. It’s about collecting it in the right way and verifying it independently. Sramana Mitra: So you verify it other
Sramana Mitra: In terms of your current business, what percentage of that is selling your own product versus selling other people’s products? Carl Mazzanti: 60% to 70% is our own. Sramana Mitra: But Infrastructure-as-a-Service, right? Carl Mazzanti: Let me answer your first question. Your first question is what percentage of it is selling your own
Sramana Mitra: Before we go to the post two-year bootstrapping phase, what did you achieve? You launched a website. You started getting customers. How did you get customers? How did the customers find you? Tim Hentschel: It wasn’t that hard in those days. The Internet was new. Blogs were just beginning to become popular. I
Sramana Mitra: What data were you collecting and what was the process of collecting that data? Rakesh Gupta: Any marketing activity in any company actually falls into three or four different kinds of marketing. One is, people using the phone to reach people. People are using email to reach people or people are doing door-to-door
Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you were building more like a toolkit as opposed to a full blown architected product? You have a toolkit that you apply wherever similar problems crop up again. Does that describe the scenario better? Carl Mazzanti: If you look at where we are 15 years from now, the primary
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Tim has built an excellent company with quite unorthodox financial engineering decisions that have played out very well for him. Read this story to learn some out-of-the-box thinking. Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and