Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you burn the $200,000 on? Guy Mucklow: Partly salaries and technology. Though we were building a lot of stuff ourselves, we needed infrastructure to support the service we were building. If you look back on those times, you think, “Why on earth did I do that?” We spent $50,000 on just building

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the evolution of your career as a software programmer in this travel services company? Christian Vanek: I worked on building the system for that conference company. Then the parent company asked me if I’d like to join them as an actual official developer. I was given more of a traditional developer title.

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Guy has bootstrapped his company to $20 million, and last Christmas, turned down a $100 million acquisition offer. Read how he has navigated his venture. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Christian has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read more about the strategies that have worked for him. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.

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Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: People do comparison shopping all the time. Steve Yi: Exactly. Amazon does the same thing. When you look for a product on Amazon, they will actually have listings for competitive retailers. It’s a combination of insurance revenue and understanding that there is media revenue from your property that you can extract. In turn,

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Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your operating expenses, how many people were involved and what kind of a P&L did you have to support within that operating margin? Steve Yi: There was three of us. One person was working with us as a contractor who eventually became our VP of Sales. Sramana Mitra: How many customers were

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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the seed round, you already had some revenues and customers? Felix Van de Maele: No. We raised the round in August 2008. We just incorporated the company. We had no customers and just had a letter of intent. Sramana Mitra: Who were the people who funded you in this round?

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 5)

Steve Yi: We were fortunate to become profitable within the second month. For that first month, we thought we could never make that math work. We were losing a lot of money in that first month. It’s specific to this business. You just have to go through that period where you’re willing to lose money. Sramana Mitra: You

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