Sramana: There is no question that the entrepreneur is the key salesperson for the first 50 or 100 customers. This may vary by the type of product, but in general that is a common scenario. Colin Day: That was true in my case. I never thought I would be great at sales, but I did
Sramana: What product were you really trying to sell during that time? Colin Day: We have three products today: Connect for passive candidates, Recruit for active candidates, and Onboard for new hires. Back then, our initial product was an applicant tracking system. It was a front-end, back-end system. On the front end we would manage
Sramana: That aligns exactly with the 1M/1M philosophy. That is what we want people to do – get to customers and revenues as quickly as possible. Our belief is that entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. Colin Day: We were forced to go that route. If I had not received that call,
Sramana: It’s funny you mention the need for funding. At 1M/1M we are strictly against that point of view. Ideas don’t get funded. You were operating at a time and in a situation where things clicked, but most of the time you need to turn an idea into a business and the business gets funded.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Colin Day is the founder, CEO and president of iCIMS, a SaaS provider of HR solutions. Prior to founding iCIMS, Colin worked in sales and new business development at Comrise Technology, an IT staffing firm. After successfully opening a new branch office in Washington D.C., Colin
Sramana: What are your key product differentiators? Virender Aggarwal: Our unique differentiators center on our complete mobile coverage capability. We can run on iPad and Android tablets with a mix of native apps and HTML5. We also have a great graphical user interface. Our system is geographically aware, and it does not ask the end
Sramana: What is your market share of the Indian ERP market, and how does Oracle and SAP fit in? Virender Aggarwal: I feel that we are getting 10% of the new business happening in the country. We see Oracle and SAP, and on occasion we will see Microsoft. We have not seen Flex at all.
Sramana: Do you have value added reseller and system integrator channels active or do you do those service yourselves? Virender Aggarwal: In the past two months we have appointed 15 partners in the US. I don’t think any partner in the US is capable of doing any of the customization work on their own. In