Sramana: What does your management team look like today? Varun Shoor: We have four members of our senior management team. Raghav Arora is our VP of Operations. He was the first employee of Kayako and was a school mate of mine. He has helped the company grow from inception. James Edwards is based out of
Sramana: After you launched the product in three months, what kind of ramp did you see in terms of adoption? Christophe: That’s a long time ago. Julien, have you seen the historical figures lately? Julien: Yeah, I did. If you talk about 2011, I want to say the numbers would look small for now. I
Sramana: How much have you been able to accomplish with your new engineering team when it comes to maturing your product? Varun Shoor: I personally believe the product is evolving. Our engineering practices can still use additional maturing although my teams believe we have evolved to a point where we are able to really leverage
Sramana: Were you bringing them to San Francisco without salary? Christophe: No. They had salary within TextMe from day one. Sramana: Okay. That’s interesting. That brings me to the next question, which is what was the financial structure of the company? Were you putting in some of your own money from your prior successes to start
Sramana: Did your dad mentor you or help you as you were starting Kayako? Varun Shoor: I went to him for feedback but the feedback he was able to give was from a different industry. He was accustomed to dealing with factory laborers. Apart from that, he did help me when it came to managing
Sramana: Okay. Let’s talk about what is the premise with which you started TextMe, Christophe? Christophe: In 2010, we were looking at new opportunities and that was the time when some other mobile communication apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango were in the market and I felt there was still a strong opportunity to do
Sramana: Let’s drill down into how you built the company. What were the milestones in the early development of Kayako? Varun Shoor: As the business started picking up, I started to recognize what was important to continued growth. The most important aspect was trust. In 2002, if someone emailed support@kayako.com and expressed interest in buying
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a wonderful story of a self-financed company that has built itself up to $10 million in profitable revenue. Led by Christophe Bach, an experienced and successful serial entrepreneur, it’s a text-book case study of effective bootstrapping. Sramana: Christophe, to start, tell me your back