Building a Robust Niche Business: FilmTrack CEO Jason Kassin (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of questions. When did you hit the million dollar mark from the point you started? What metrics did you raise funding with?

Jason Kassin: I’m not exactly sure, but it was probably around 2007 that we hit that threshold. At that time, we didn’t think it was some magical threshold. The metrics that we used when we received our funding was what we had booked as recurring revenue at that time and what we were forecasting to be the recurring revenue based on a certain retention rate of the current customers and new customers coming on board. >>>

Building a Robust Niche Business: FilmTrack CEO Jason Kassin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: After the client from which you identified the business opportunity of turning this into a product, who was your next client? Once you turn it into a product, how long did it take you to start acquiring actual clients?

Jason Kassin: I think the number two client was a company in Amsterdam, which was interesting. Almost immediately after the launch of our system, we were exposed to a non-US centric approach to the business. That was very helpful in the way we contemplated things like handling multiple currencies. That was pretty early on when we were exposed to additional companies >>>

Building a Robust Niche Business: FilmTrack CEO Jason Kassin (Part 3)

Jason Kassin: Through a series of events, we ended up getting a large investment from a private equity group in 2013. That transformed FilmTrack from a small startup to a much larger organization that was funded by a private equity group and was able to grow substantially in the last three years. That investment, we hadn’t even contemplated at that point, was the turbo charge.

Actually, one of our clients was very much taken in by what we had done. He saw something in our software that we, >>>

Building a Robust Niche Business: FilmTrack CEO Jason Kassin (Part 2)

Jason Kassin: The ability to record all your distribution agreements in film and television was the genesis of FilmTrack. That has changed dramatically since even the mid 90’s. There was not any such thing as streaming back then. The notion of the business was distributing content to various mediums and territories, various languages and channels, and being able to record the terms of those arrangements. It’s almost like an inventory system, but it’s a multidimensional inventory. I was doing that at the same time that I was  >>>

Building a Robust Niche Business: FilmTrack CEO Jason Kassin (Part 1)

You’ve heard me say over and over again that niches make for great business opportunities. In this story, you will read how an entrepreneur with deep domain knowledge in the film industry created a robust niche business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jason Kassin: I’m from a little town called Brooklyn, New York. I was actually born in upstate New York just by accident. It was summer and that’s where my family happened to be at that time. I came of age, from a computer standpoint, during that dawn of the personal computer era. I’ve been working in the computer world and the software world since the dawn of the personal computer era. >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do this company for? What kind of metrics did you reach during that period?

Aviram Jenik: We started in 1999 and we still do this today.

Sramana Mitra: This is Beyond Security?

Aviram Jenik: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Then let’s talk about the inflection points. From 1999 to after experimentation with 

>>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were open to all the vulnerabilities.

Aviram Jenik: Correct. That gave us the opportunity to do this security check for you. If your severs are out there in the Internet, we can also tell you if you’ve got all these problems. We started offering that as a remote. What’s funny about this is, this whole process was something that we stumbled into and we didn’t think was a big deal. We saw it as a temporary thing. We’re still selling that service today.

Sramana Mitra: Wow. >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 4)

Aviram Jenik: As time passed, there were little engines on the customer side. Java became popular and started replacing what we were doing. The Internet became faster and faster. We shifted towards remote support for something like a printer driver stopping to work. Anybody who had a computer in the second half of the 90s will have a memory of something like this happening. You install a driver. It doesn’t work. You reinstall. You call support. It was frustrating.

Such driver issues and software compatibility were very big issues for a lot of companies. We adjusted our remote engines to do technical support. Instead of calling HP and spending an hour on the phone, we give them instructions. We had an >>>