Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to launch the SaaS version of this product? When did you start selling that product? J. Paul Haynes: A year. Sramana Mitra: We are talking 2011. J. Paul Haynes: Yes. Sramana Mitra: So in 2012, you were a SaaS  company?

Building a Fast-Growth Marketplace: Stefania Mallett, CEO of EZCater (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Two-sided marketplaces are perpetually difficult to build and scale. EZCater is approaching a billion dollars in gross marketplace value of transactions. Learn more from Stefania about working through the chicken and egg challenge. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are

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Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you raise money? You said you worked with some investors that you had prior relationships with and who wanted to get in early. Are these Canadian investors? J. Paul Haynes: The first investor was Venture Link, which was Toronto-based. They came in fairly early. They have another affiliate firm. The government

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Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 7)

Carl Ryden: Andi is every relationship manager’s dream analyst. She’s there with you in every deal. She sees what you’re doing. She sees your entire portfolio. She’s there with you to help you find ways to make that work better for the customer and the bank. How it came to be is, we had a

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Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For the Series A investors, what did you tell them you were going to do? What problem were you going to solve? J. Paul Haynes: I described to them the problem of solving cyber security in the mid-market. Everybody in the industry at that time appeared to be focused on the enterprise. We

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Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do and what model were you trying to reach? Carl Ryden: There were a couple things that changed during that time. One is, the transactional sales people that we hired were not a good fit for our culture and how we operated. When we made changes, we wrote down our values.

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Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before all this, it sounds like you started doing companies in ’76. I don’t think we have enough time to cover that long a story. It sounds like you have a background in enterprise security software. Could you give us a little bit of an idea about what you did before? J. Paul

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Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You must have had a lot of relationships in that business since you were coming into this business trying to do something better than what you’ve done before. Did many of those relationships convert into paying customers? Carl Ryden: Yes. We call them switchers. We get someone to switch from something they had

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