Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said in 2006 you were doing $6 million? OJ Whatley: Yes, $6 million – $500,000 in receipts per month. Sramana Mitra: What was the inventory situation at that point? OJ Whatley: I probably had closer to 50 to 80. Sramana Mitra: That’s still out of your home?

Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 5)

Sramana: How much money did you raise to start the company? Rob Hull: We raised about $4.5 million in our initial round in late 2003. Sramana: What were your milestones with that money? Rob Hull: We wanted to get the product built, hire an executive team, and have a set of reference customers. That is

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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business was entirely Panerai until what year? OJ Whatley: Until about 2003. Sramana Mitra: What did you do after 2003? OJ Whatley: Again, I’ve always loved watches. Panerai has captured my heart. In fact to this day, my license plate is Panerai. I fell in love with Panerai like

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 4)

Sramana: Once you recognized the problem area, what were your next steps? Rob Hull: Our goal with building Adaptive Insights was to apply the concepts of ease of use in a cloud-based format to really attack the space that Hyperion was in. Sramana: Which specific problem did you go after as your killer app? Rob

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So your system recommends where to move the dollars to? John Wallace: Correct. Sramana Mitra: How do you sell this solution? What part of your organization is buying and how is the sales cycle?

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit more about some of the granular details of specific elements? OJ Whatley: In 2000, I walked into a watch store and I happened to pick up these hardcover books on the history of Panerai. They were like coffee table books. I went on eBay and found about eight of these

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like you discovered the business need by recognizing the lack of tools for CFOs, and that you discovered the lack of those tools while you were working as a CFO consultant. Is that a correct statement? Rob Hull: Yes, that is. There were not good tools for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analytics.

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you could be more granular, how do you account for that? What data can you work off of and how do you tie that to how you charge? John Wallace: I thought you were going in the direction of how I know what they spend. So you mean how do we measure

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