If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a wonderful story of a self-financed company that built itself up to $10 million in profitable revenue. Led by Christophe Bach, an experienced and successful serial entrepreneur, this is a text-book case study of effective bootstrapping. Sramana: Christophe, to start, tell me your back
Sramana: Can you talk, Christophe, about what has been your strategy in terms of building the team? You started with four co-founders and sounds like Julien came on board about a year later. Who else is on the team now, how big is the team and what has been your philosophy in building the team
Sramana: Talk about the execution side. You mentioned that the ad networks were not really setup to work with a telecom company in this mode. So which ad network were you able to work with to get this model going? Julien: Christophe, you want to take that one? Christophe: Yeah. I would not say that
Sramana: Can you give me some idea about how the company ramped in terms of users beyond May 2012 when you brought to market the product with the more advanced functionality. Christophe: We had 9 million downloads at the end of 2012. Today we have 20 million. Sramana: That’s pretty fast. May 2012 to December
Sramana: After you launched the product in three months, what kind of ramp did you see in terms of adoption? Christophe: That’s a long time ago. Julien, have you seen the historical figures lately? Julien: Yeah, I did. If you talk about 2011, I want to say the numbers would look small for now. I
Sramana: Were you bringing them to San Francisco without salary? Christophe: No. They had salary within TextMe from day one. Sramana: Okay. That’s interesting. That brings me to the next question, which is what was the financial structure of the company? Were you putting in some of your own money from your prior successes to start
Sramana: Okay. Let’s talk about what is the premise with which you started TextMe, Christophe? Christophe: In 2010, we were looking at new opportunities and that was the time when some other mobile communication apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango were in the market and I felt there was still a strong opportunity to do
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a wonderful story of a self-financed company that has built itself up to $10 million in profitable revenue. Led by Christophe Bach, an experienced and successful serial entrepreneur, it’s a text-book case study of effective bootstrapping. Sramana: Christophe, to start, tell me your back