A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 3)

Sramana: How were customers finding you? How did you generate all of those downloadable sales? Tim Berry: At that point it was a nice convergence of retail and web. We were buoyed by good reviews in magazines like PC World, Entrepreneur, and Inc. As the web grew, those reviews became links. We had a full-time

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A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you actually start making a real business out of the software? Tim Berry: This really is one of those “darkest moments before dawn” stories. By 1994 the template business had failed in retail. We had a $250,000 liability for returns. We had boxes and boxes of software coming back to us, and

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A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 1)

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, and he is also the originator of plan-as-you-go business planning. He writes at Planning, Startups, Stories, one of the most popular small business blogs. Sabrina Parsons has served as the CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. Prior to this role she co-founded a

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Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 7)

Sramana: Where is your inside sales team located? Pallav Nadhani: They are all in India. Most of them are in Bangalore, although some of them are in Calcutta. Sramana: How has your team evolved and shifted over the past several years? Pallav Nadhani: One of our biggest challenges is that it is very hard to

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Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 6)

Sramana: You said you changed your pricing and started going after mid-sized and other larger customers. How did you manage that process? It can be tricky to change pricing. Pallav Nadhani: We started at $15 and the next year we moved it to $35. After that we went to $99, $250 and finally $500. In

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Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 5)

Sramana: In 2006 you were close to a million dollars in revenue and had a staff of 10 people. What happened next? Pallav Nadhani: Over the years I had received a lot of requests to build new features and capabilities in Fusion Charts. Instead of building them inside of Fusion Charts, we built a new

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Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 4)

Sramana: How much revenue were you able to generate during your first year of operations when you had no formal marketing budget? Pallav Nadhani: Our first version launched in October 2002. Our accounting cycles run from April to March. From October 2002 to March 2003, I was able to generate around $10,000.

Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 3)

Sramana: Once you had created your first product out of the charting functions, how did your first customers find you? Pallav Nadhani: They were folks who had read my article on Wrox. The first payments I received were from people who read about my work there. Once the product was good, I put it up

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