Sramana Mitra: What apps are getting you in the door at the enterprises? Beerud Sheth: I think sales usually is the biggest because these are decentralized teams. Real-time information has a huge impact on sales performance. If they are behind target, they can react to it in real-time. Sramana Mitra; Who’s buying in the sales
Sramana Mitra: The seed round was mid-2012. Then two years later, you raised what you’re now calling Series A – the $5.5 million. Jodie Fox: Yes, we did do bridge rounds in between. In November 2013, we raised $1.75 million. Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story that is worth highlighting in the
Sramana Mitra: In 2012, you had around $1.5 million in revenue and you had a bunch of customers. In 2013, Samsung expressed interest in both becoming a customer and an investor. That’s when you started seeing the traction from the VCs? Manmeet Singh: Yes. Toba Capital moved faster than anybody else. My old angels have
Sramana Mitra: These are large enterprise deals essentially. Beerud Sheth: Yes and no. They are large enterprises but selling to them is quite easy because we designed the product to be very simple. The app is a freemium product available in the app store and in the cloud. You just download and can get started in
Sramana Mitra: Did you have the ability to manufacture at a large scale with your design partner and did you have all the shipping and handling set up at that point? Jodie Fox: Yes, we did have the setup for the shipping and handling of international orders. We didn’t necessarily have the correct manufacturing setup.
Manmeet Singh: Those four years were a struggle for me. Generally, entrepreneurs don’t last four or five years of struggle. There was no money and very little revenue. The VCs weren’t spending money and enterprise business was not looked upon as a good business. That’s the reason why I was out every week raising money.
Sramana Mitra: Tell me about this new product. Beerud Sheth: We’ve been working on it for a year. It’s been in beta for a few months and we’re launching it right now. We’re very excited about it because I think it brings some very clever ideas to the table. Just stepping back, with the rise
Jodie Fox: Around five months later in March 2010, the next big thing we did was work with a YouTube blogger to promote Shoes of Prey. This idea of working with YouTube was not one that we’d heard of before. This YouTube blogger that we approached had a following that she had built around make-up videos. She