Sramana Mitra: Why do you need to filter the needs? From what you described, it sounds like the system is pretty self-correcting or self-converting? David Barrett: It is. Most of our time is spent minimizing the number of times that you will need to reach out to us. For example, it’s possible that we can
Sramana: During the nine-month bootstrapping phase, how many people were focused on the services business and how many people were focused on product development? I’m also curious about how your business breaks down between Croatia and London. Alex Fuller: The business breaks down 50/50 between London and Croatia. We also bring consultants from Croatia onsite with
Sramana Mitra: At that point, you said you were charging subscriptions. Was anyone paying for subscription? David Barrett: That’s interesting as well. At that time, we weren’t charging. In fact, we didn’t intend to charge for a long time. We raised our million dollars, did our pivot and were doing expense reports. This business was going to
John Miller: One of the challenges they have coming back into education is the whole on boarding process and preparing the employee to come back in. There’re a number of demands that really come into play here. When you start to think about regaining your study skills and the ability to do time management with the
Sramana: How did you go about building your team in Croatia? Alex Fuller: We flew out there and did some relatively simple job advertising. We set up an assessment center where we invited people to come and spend a couple of days with us. We put them through a training course because the Force.com platform
Sramana: If you were to position this in the context of 2009, when you founded the company, what would the competitive landscape look like? Who was your closest competitor? Alex Fuller: That’s a good question. We were offering this system to a number of companies but the telecom sector was a key focus for us
Sramana Mitra: Who was your co-founder? How did you know him? Why him? David Barrett: His name is Witold Stankiewicz. He was my first hire at Red Swoosh. After I got fired, within a couple of weeks, everyone else quit. I was what was really holding that team at Akamai. They brought in some other
The Force.com platform has been a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Alex and Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform. Sramana: Alex, let’s start with your personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial story? Alex Fuller: I was born in