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Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 3)
Sramana: How did the business ramp in 2002? Varun Shoor: It was quite interesting. I started receiving money at the very end of 2001, and then it kept coming in 2002. I kept telling my mom and dad that I had just earned $1,000 and they would not believe me. They made me show them
Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 2)
Sramana: When did you learn to program? Varun Shoor: I learned to program when I was 13. We had x286 and x386 computers, so I started learning FoxPro and Visual FoxPro. This was in 1996. My father had a spare computer from his factory, so he gave it to me. I did not get a
Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. [Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India] Varun Shoor is the founder and CEO of Kayako, a company offering advanced helpdesk management software. Varun steers the overall direction of the company and as customer experience fanatic and lead
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 7)
Sramana: What are your primary customer acquisition methods? Paras Chopra: We are starting to do a mix of marketing and sales. For the longest time we focused solely on our content marketing. We have tried AdWords, Salesforce and even LinkedIn marketing programs. What has worked for us is content marketing. Sramana: This is the case
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 6)
Sramana: It sounds like you had a very good conversion rate. Paras Chopra: The conversion rate was around 10%. I also got some hate mail from users who expected the product to be free forever. They told me I should be ashamed of myself for charging money and pointed out that Google’s products were free.
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 5)
Sramana: What timeframe was all of this work occurring? Paras Chopra: I started coding the second version in December of 2009. Sramana: You basically bootstrapped Wingify using your paycheck, correct? Paras Chopra: Yes. I spent about $20 for a domain name and really had no major expenses. I really just invested my time. My living
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 4)
Sramana: Did you build the entire project yourself or did you hire people to help you? Paras Chopra: I paid about 50,000 rupees for a website design. I did a very basic product design myself. I launched the website on Hacker News, and the feedback I received was horrible. Nobody understood what I was trying
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 3)
Sramana: Obviously you don’t have a background in marketing. Typically we see people getting into a field with fairly significant domain knowledge and then building a product using that domain knowledge. You seem to have come into marketing optimization without real knowledge of marketing. How did that work? Paras Chopra: Looking back I think I