categories
HOT TOPICS
- 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
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 6)
Sramana: What were the major business milestones of 2012? Tony Jamous: First and foremost, we turned profitable and cash flow positive. We were a small team of 10 people. Our model has a lot of success with high volume senders because we let them cut out the middleman. We target the existing market first and
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 5)
Sramana: What was your gross margin on the $2 million of revenue that you generated? Tony Jamous: Our business is wholesale. The industry average margin is 17%, and we are in that range. Sramana: You presumably had some funds available to you from your revenues. Were you profitable at that point? Tony Jamous: No, we
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 4)
Sramana: Can you talk about the technology required to accomplish the SMS market arbitrage? Typically VCs don’t like to invest in pure arbitrage model companies. How did you convince them you were a technology company as opposed to an arbitrage company? Tony Jamous: The arbitrage was our minimum viable product. We did not have a
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 3)
Sramana: First customers are critical to an entrepreneurs success. How did you find your first customers and sell to them? How did you know that you really understood their problem well enough to get them to wire you €5,000? Tony Jamous: In our case our market is a commodity marketplace. The commodity I was selling,
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 2)
Sramana: What came next for you? Tony Jamous: My dream has always been to be an entrepreneur. I thought that getting an MBA would put me on a better path. That was completely wrong, obviously, but I left the company and went to IMB, which is one of the top MBA programs in Europe. I spent
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Tony Jamous is the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo, a company that hosts a cloud-based SMS API which allows high volume transmission of messages at wholesale prices. Tony spent 12 years in the wholesale messaging industry at mBlox and Paymo, where he opened mobile messaging and
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 7)
Sramana: I think you have a tremendous advantage because you have 50,000 customers who already know you. They know what quality you deliver. They are your customers, and I think that is why you are getting the higher conversion rates. Scott Skinger: In our financial models we were trying to be conservative. We were looking
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 6)
Sramana: What assumptions are you making in terms of what percentage of your existing customer base will convert to the new business model? Scott Skinger: I have been very conservative building financial models. We did not have real data prior to the launch, and as of today I have 10 days of data collected. Prior