Sramana: What’s the name of your German friend? Brian Requarth: His name is Thomas Floracks. Sramana: So Thomas was doing the technical work, you were doing the sales and marketing work in this little web development business that you put together? Brian Requarth: Yes. He built the first couple of websites. I would sell the
We’ve done Entrepreneur Journeys stories on a few Latin American entrepreneurs like Marcos Galperin (MercadoLibre), Ricardo Villadiego (Easy Solutions), Rodrigo Teijeiro (Sonico), and Martin Migoya (Globant). In this story, we bring you Brian Requarth, whose scrappy maneuvering has resulted in a $10M+ business with $30M+ in financing – a tough act in Latin America. Sramana:
Sramana: What does the business look like today? Where are you now? Rik Chomko: Last year, we had one of the biggest revenue growth we’ve ever had. We grew revenues by about 45%. We’re feeling very good about our business in Europe and North America. We have good traction in the market. We’ve done a great
Sramana: In that timeframe, what kind of numbers were you doing? Were you still operating organically? That’s one million in financing and then you’re operating organically, what are the metrics of the business at this point? Rik Chomko: Back in 2005, we were operating organically. But 2005 and 2006 was quite a big jump for us. We increased
Sramana: What was the number of customers? What were the major milestones in 2004? What were you able to accomplish? Rik Chomko: We had about 10 customers in 2004 and then probably another 15 in 2005, so we were starting to really get some momentum. We also started getting some bigger blue chip customers and a lot more attention from overseas. This was
Sramana: That year in 2003, how many customers were you able to bring on? I assume you were targeting the insurance industry and all the customers who are from the insurance industry. Rik Chomko: Yes. Interestingly enough, while we were targeting people from the insurance industry, the customers we actually landed were completely outside of the insurance
Sramana: What I’m trying to understand is how did you manage to bootstrap the Version 1.0 piece of your journey? Was there some of the services money that this company was paying you that went into building the product? Rik Chomko: Yes. That’s exactly how we did it. So we bootstrapped it and were trying
Rik Chomko: Once we shut down the services company, my business partner and I wanted to start a product company. Our idea was to provide software to corporations which would allow them to modify logic without any coding effort. Sramana: What year are we talking here? Rik Chomko: This is in 2002.