If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. One more look at what it takes to build a fat startup. Sunny Gupta discusses Apptio. The company raised a $7 million series A to get started, and then went to raise over $130 million thus far. Sramana Mitra: Sunny, let’s start at the very beginning.
Sramana: At what point in the friendship did the idea of doing a business together start coming into the foreground? Amy Laws: That was in the summer of 2010. We had attended a sample sale. The wholesale showrooms in places like Dallas, New York, and Atlanta purchase sample sets from their manufacturers. That is what
Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that’s worth discussing in your story in terms of strategy and moves that led to big losses or wins? Hamid Shojaee: From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think that having that focus on a particular market segment is very important and then doing things for that market segment that creates
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Advertising on Facebook is complicated. You can spend tons of money getting ‘Likes’ without making any sales. Smocked Auctions is very smart about actually ‘selling’ on Facebook. Much to learn! Sramana: Amy and Nicole, I would like to start by talking a bit about your personal
Sramana Mitra: This whole phenomenon of having employees do intrapreneurship is a big trend that we’re looking at a lot. In our incubation program, we do a lot of corporate incubation. We have this Incubator-in-a-Box program that a bunch of corporations are using to layer their own incubation programs. We run, for example, a large
Sramana: After listening to your story, it really seems like the software model is the best option for scaling the business and that there is a lot of opportunity there. Rod Brown: There is plenty of opportunity in the US as well as opportunities abroad. We are looking at an opportunity in South Africa that
Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about competition. This is very standard, right? Going from an on-premise to SaaS subscription model, businesses will always take a hit and then come back to a growth path. That’s very standard process. My next question is more a question on competitive landscape ecosystem. What is your
Sramana: How big is your SaaS business from a revenue perspective, and how does that compare to your clinical side? Rod Brown: A little north of $2 million dollars a year in recurring revenue. Last year the other side of the business did about $4.5 million dollars. Sramana: Do you anticipate buying more behavioral health