Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 5)

Sramana: Once you brought the new technology to the market, how did it do? How long did it take for it to find its stride? Steve Cotton: The impact was immediate. Our expectations were very conservative, but within two quarters our entire customer based flipped over to our product as opposed to the other products

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Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 4)

Sramana: What was so promising about the new technology that made you want to acquire it? Steve Cotton: In the world of battery monitoring, we were frustrated with monolithic systems based on 1980s designs. You would have a big panel sitting in a wall with batteries from floor to ceiling. Those systems were customized and

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Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 3)

Sramana: How did revenue scale as you following this strategy? Steve Cotton: We started with revenues of $470,000 and then went to $1.5 million and got up to $7.5 million. This cash revenue gave us some flexibility to develop a strategy for the future. We looked into the marketplace and found a technology company that

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Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 2)

Sramana: Was your father’s business model basically selling services around someone else’s product? Steve Cotton: Yes. The company’s business model was essentially a manufacturer’s representative of a battery monitor product. Companies would deploy these systems into their data centers, and then when they would have problems they would realize that there had been indicators in

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Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Steve Cotton is the founder and executive chairman of Canara, a company that provides turnkey backup power solutions and predictive monitoring solutions for mission critical operations focusing on data centers, telecommunications sites, wind/solar farms, smart grid and electric vehicles. Prior to Canara he was the director

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 7)

Sramana: You have identified a sweet spot of $10 million-plus e-commerce companies. How many of those are there in London? Graham Cooke: In the UK, we think there are a couple of thousand of these businesses. The UK Internet market is around $80 billion.

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 6)

Sramana: Adobe definately did not have this path in their original plans. They are a bunch of technologies bolted together. Graham Cooke: Omniture bought a lot of companies before Adobe bought them. Then Adobe added all of the other things. Their vision is definitely correct but the execution is difficult to do. Sramana: When you

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 5)

Sramana: What were you doing with your technology? I understand that you collected and categorized customer feedback. Where you then making recommendations when they cam eback to the site? Graham Cooke: It’s more than that. We wanted to learn, from the 4% of users who gave feedback, how to solve issues for all users on

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