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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 3)
Sramana: First customers are critical to an entrepreneurs success. How did you find your first customers and sell to them? How did you know that you really understood their problem well enough to get them to wire you €5,000? Tony Jamous: In our case our market is a commodity marketplace. The commodity I was selling,
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 2)
Sramana: What came next for you? Tony Jamous: My dream has always been to be an entrepreneur. I thought that getting an MBA would put me on a better path. That was completely wrong, obviously, but I left the company and went to IMB, which is one of the top MBA programs in Europe. I spent
Building a SMS API Company from London: Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Tony Jamous is the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo, a company that hosts a cloud-based SMS API which allows high volume transmission of messages at wholesale prices. Tony spent 12 years in the wholesale messaging industry at mBlox and Paymo, where he opened mobile messaging and
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 7)
Sramana: I think you have a tremendous advantage because you have 50,000 customers who already know you. They know what quality you deliver. They are your customers, and I think that is why you are getting the higher conversion rates. Scott Skinger: In our financial models we were trying to be conservative. We were looking
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 6)
Sramana: What assumptions are you making in terms of what percentage of your existing customer base will convert to the new business model? Scott Skinger: I have been very conservative building financial models. We did not have real data prior to the launch, and as of today I have 10 days of data collected. Prior
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 5)
Sramana: You mentioned that you now have about 55 employees. What are the functional skill sets of your employee groups? Scott Skinger: Over the last two years we have hired a lot of developers. Two years ago we had zero people on our development team, and now we have close to 15. We are a
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 4)
Sramana: Earlier you mentioned that you were making money by up-selling new products to your customer base. Where did your initial set of customers come from? Scott Skinger: My earliest customers came from a variety of sources for a variety of reasons. The organic traffic and pay-per-click traffic both brought in customers. In 2003 our
Bootstrapping with $120k Credit Card Debt to $7m Revenue: Scott Skinger, CEO of TrainSignal (Part 3)
Sramana: How did you take your initial courses to market? How did you access customers? Scott Skinger: In 2002 I was building courses. Before I could get a course to market, I ran up close to $120,000 in credit card debt. Sramana: Whoa! What were you doing with $120,000 of credit card debt? Scott Skinger: