Mack Sundaram: Exactly. There’s always that human psychology element that tells you, “Maybe you’re not ready. Maybe you should wait another year.” That was one side of the brain holding me back. At the same time, since I’d already tasted being in a startup situation a decade before that, the lure of that novelty was
Sramana Mitra: I did a startup in AI 20 years ago. That was not when AI was really happening. Mack Sundaram: There you go. It was incredible to get that opportunity. It was a great experience for me. Sramana Mitra: You left the company, though? Mack Sundaram: We sold the system to the Department of
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Mack has built a successful business optimized for autonomy and profitability. Excellent navigation! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Tell us where you’re from. Where did you grow up? Where were you born and raised? Mack Sundaram: I was born in
Sramana Mitra: Is this an inside sales model? What is the go-to market? Anthony Ferry: It has turned out to be more of an inside sales type of selling. It’ a hybrid. That was a learning for me. What I was used to was more of an outside sales in a consultative arena. Especially when
Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing from a business-building point of view. You have about 500 companies that are using the Where To Buy solution. All these other products that you have come up with, to what extent are these products up-sells into those customers bases? Anthony Ferry: Every single one of them. As
Anthony Ferry: The veer off to the B2C was because we saw an opportunity where there were a lot of solutions, and we thought that we had better data. It also was a much larger market if we were to succeed. You’re talking about your customers being monetized in a grander scale having millions of
Sramana Mitra: The technology you got from Jon was a separate company and not part of Neudesic? Anthony Ferry: That is currently a separate company. That’s the company that I’m currently the CEO of. It was formed upon the acquisition of that technology. He had built a very ingenious crawling engine for data acquisition across
Sramana Mitra: Was there any specific type of clients that you were getting traction with? Anthony Ferry: Finance and banking companies were a big one. Hospitality was another big one. We built some pretty elaborate hospitality systems for hotels, gaming, and things of that nature. It was fairly diverse. We were getting a lot of