Sramana: Who is your typical power user? Are they small businesses? Wendy Tan White: Today it is predominately small businesses. In the early days we had a wide ranging audience. We had hobbyists, home users, and small businesses.
Sramana: It was mentioned that in the early days you did a lot of freelance work. This is a common strategy employed by entrepreneurs. We recommend it heavily in 1M/1M. Would you talk more about that? Wendy Tan White: During the first phase of our business, we learned that if you have too much money
Sramana: How much money did you put in to start up Moonfruit? Wendy Tan White: We seeded the company with our own money. I put in $50,000 to start with. Joe White: We basically worked for equity to a point of around $200,000. The first investment we received was from Bain, which put in $500,000.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Wendy Tan White is the CEO of Moonfruit, a company she cofounded with Eirik Pettersen and Joe White. Moonfruit is an on-demand website development platform that allows anyone to develop a website for any purpose in a matter of minutes. Prior to Moonfruit, Wendy worked at
Sramana: You entered 2010 with a proof of concept based on pilots in a few different companies across different verticals. What came next? Raj De Datta: In 2009 we knew we were able to give companies a significant lift. We did not know how to sell our capability or how to price our capability. We
Sramana: What rates of improvements do your customers see when they deploy your solution? Raj De Datta: They will see results as soon as one week. At the one-year point they should see an 80% improvement, especially in the areas of natural search.
Sramana: Would you give me a use case of how a company would employ BloomReach? Raj De Datta: Search is by far the most-used method to find content. People put a query into a search engine, which in turn presents information to users, who click on links to visit. From the perspective of the website
Sramana: What was the result of your two year entrepreneur in residence experience? Did you emerge with a clarified approach for a new company? Raj De Datta: When I was an entrepreneur in residence I started a cloud infrastructure company. I raised 500,000 dollars from the VC firm and then we experienced the 2008 meltdown.