Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When did you leave Sage? Mitch Russo: 1998. Sramana Mitra: Then you came back to Boston. What happens next?

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to team. You started as a solo entrepreneur? Cedric Saverese: Yes. Sramana Mitra: How long did you carry on as a solo entrepreneur? Cedric Saverese: Two to three years, while it was a side project. When I did it full-time, I hired the first person within the next few months. Sramana

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 5)

Mitch Russo: As I said, tech support was starting to run very long waits. A woman called and announced that she is the head of the legal technology division for the Los Angeles Bar Association. She was having terrible problems. She said our software crashed her computer and that we better get somebody out there right

Read Full Article »

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started, which competitors did you see most in deals? Cedric Saverese: When I started, there was not a lot of competitive deals. We didn’t have a sales team. It was more like, “Here’s a product. If you want it, buy it.” We didn’t have a lot of visibility into our customers’

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 4)

Mitch Russo: We started running classified ads in Legal Tech and other journals. We were tracking these very carefully. If we spend $50 on an ad and if we got six or seven orders, we knew that the ad was great. We just kept doing it every week. We knew what was working and what was

Read Full Article »

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? You’ve got this hundred or so customers. You’ve got some validation. Were you ready to quit the job? Cedric Savarese: Yes, we moved to a slightly bigger town but were still in the same area. I was hoping to find other people to help me grow the company. At this

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 3)

Mitch Russo: All of a sudden, my whole business was gone. There was no longer a reason to be in business. Neil and I sat down together and we brainstormed. Where else can we use this technology that we created? We came up with the idea that there are other people who bill by their time.

Read Full Article »

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept? What were you trying to do with this company when you started? Cedric Savarese: The original idea was to make the data acquisition process more accessible to stakeholders. As an IT professional, I had built quite a few forms and surveys from scratch. I was very familiar with the

Read Full Article »