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robert hoehn
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $5M from Scratch
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The Innovation Management software space is quite crowded. When I spoke to Co-founder Robert Hoehn in 2016, IdeaScale had managed to carve out a niche. Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping IdeaScale to $5M from Scratch
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The Innovation Management software space is quite crowded. When I spoke to Co-founder Robert Hoehn in 2016, IdeaScale had managed to carve out a niche. Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 7)
Robert Hoehn: Just to circle back to the competitive advantage, another one is data. Early on, we took the stance that we don’t want to charge volume-based pricing, which is against the grain for enterprise software. Most people are looking at it and saying, “Enterprise CIOs expect to pay per seat.” We’re afraid that customers
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What did you learn in your international expansion? Was there any particular geography that was adopting your technology faster than others? Robert Hoehn: On the marketing side, a lot of people shy away from it just because it’s hard work. It’s already hard to run a marketing campaign with SEO and demand generation.
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers were you able to gather as paying customers to get to this million dollar annual revenue? Robert Hoehn: I think it was about 50 enterprise customers. Sramana Mitra: How were you selling? Were you selling on the phone? How were you going to market? Robert Hoehn: I did it
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the financial framework of this government relationship? Robert Hoehn: Actially, we did most of it for free. Sramana Mitra: How were you getting by? How did you sustain the company? Robert Hoehn: We put a small cash infusion in to start off. We quickly pivoted to try to sell to enterprise customers
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make the next major strategic move and at what scale were you at that point? Robert Hoehn: Around late 2008, we were getting a lot of requests for the idea of having a comment in a survey that could be displayed to other survey respondents and they could
Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale are we talking? How many customers were you able to get? What pricing model were you using? What are some of the business metrics at the point at which you quit the job? Robert Hoehn: I apologize. It’s been a little while, so I don’t quite remember. The basic
