Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 2)

Sramana: Was your father’s business model basically selling services around someone else’s product? Steve Cotton: Yes. The company’s business model was essentially a manufacturer’s representative of a battery monitor product. Companies would deploy these systems into their data centers, and then when they would have problems they would realize that there had been indicators in

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Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Steve Cotton is the founder and executive chairman of Canara, a company that provides turnkey backup power solutions and predictive monitoring solutions for mission critical operations focusing on data centers, telecommunications sites, wind/solar farms, smart grid and electric vehicles. Prior to Canara he was the director

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 7)

Sramana: You have identified a sweet spot of $10 million-plus e-commerce companies. How many of those are there in London? Graham Cooke: In the UK, we think there are a couple of thousand of these businesses. The UK Internet market is around $80 billion.

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 6)

Sramana: Adobe definately did not have this path in their original plans. They are a bunch of technologies bolted together. Graham Cooke: Omniture bought a lot of companies before Adobe bought them. Then Adobe added all of the other things. Their vision is definitely correct but the execution is difficult to do. Sramana: When you

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 5)

Sramana: What were you doing with your technology? I understand that you collected and categorized customer feedback. Where you then making recommendations when they cam eback to the site? Graham Cooke: It’s more than that. We wanted to learn, from the 4% of users who gave feedback, how to solve issues for all users on

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 4)

Sramana: In the first few quarters of 2010, you released a minimum viable product by outsourcing to India and hiring some freelancers. Can you tell us a bit more about that process? Graham Cooke: It is not easy to go that route. Luckily, Emre is a great coder, and he could build the architecture and

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 3)

Sramana: What was your first minimally viable product? Graham Cooke: There were two things that we wanted to do. In 2010, web analytics was not getting feedback. When you are on a website, why do people do things? We wanted to understand why people did stuff. We wrote a very simple survey system to ask

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 2)

Sramana: Did your work at Google lead you into starting Qubit? Graham Cooke: My last three years at Google were spent working on a product designed to measure how advertisers on Google’s platform were investing their media budgets on different campaigns. If you were a company like Amazon and you spend hundreds of thousands of

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