Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services from London to Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services coverage, we bring you HighQ Founder CEO Ajay Patel’s story from London in 2014. Thomson Reuters acquired HighQ in 2019. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of

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Best of Bootstrapping: HighQ was Bootstrapped Using Services from London

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services coverage, we bring you HighQ Founder CEO Ajay Patel’s story from London. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Ajay Patel: I was born in London about

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting that I should have asked you about? Ajay Patel: One thing I think is very important for every SaaS business like ours is profitability. The market is soon going to not accept that a lot of SaaS businesses aren’t profitable. The argument is always that the customer acquisition cost

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you position against a Huddle? We’ve done the Huddle story for instance. SharePoint is a well-known product. Tell me how you position against each of them. The reason I ask you is because we try to give our readers a lot of exposure on positioning. If you could help us think

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: £50,000 is a high-touch sale. Ajay Patel: It’s a high-touch sale. When I look at the customer lifetime value, that’s what’s actually impressive. We’ve compared sales. Who are the clients we’ve had in January 1, 2012? What do they make? What do the same clients make in January 2013? Our average cohort is 25%.

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Anything that starts to validate and gets clients into a product is really a key milestone. In everything that we do, that milestone makes a humongous difference. Ajay Patel: It was a turning point for us. Sramana Mitra: In what year was that? Ajay Patel: That was in 2006. Sramana Mitra: At that

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of projects were you taking on during that time? Ajay Patel: Development projects. Sramana Mitra: So it had nothing to do with the legal industry? Ajay Patel: Not much, to be honest. Sramana Mitra: You got whatever you got and you did whatever you could get.

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 2)

Ajay Patel: The vision was to build our own deal room or file sharing application and then license that to the legal industry. We put in our savings, which amounted to $30,000 and started HighQ. To this day, it is still a bootstrapped company. Having no money meant no salary, but it also meant that you had

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