categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users? Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: At this point, were you charging for the product? Anthony Smith: We were not. Anybody could install Insightly and start using it. I was still at Perth in Western Australia. A lot of Google’s customers were based in the US which is a 12-hour time difference. A lot of stuff was happening in
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model. Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company? Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)
Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from?
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors? JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory? JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends,
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)
JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm,
