Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did this $21 million, which you raised, enable you to do that you couldn’t have done organically?

John Pope: Not all of it was direct. We had some secondary in there. Out of respect to the guy who moved on, I won’t say exactly how much. The funding that we used as a company went mostly towards building out a world-class platform. In communications, even more so in a lot of other cloud services, uptime is paramount. If a website isn’t available for a few minutes, people don’t stress too much.

If you’re on a phone call and there’s a disruption, that is a potential revenue killer. We realized that our service is incredibly >>>

Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start Linguamatics?

Roger Hale: In 2001, right after the dot-com bubble. I had always been interested in starting a company. I don’t really like working for other people. The key moment in starting Linguamatics was SRI deciding to wind down and shut down its Cambridge lab. We felt that there was a potential for a novel approach which could make text mining and natural language processing technology more readily applicable to commercial problems.

The novelty was to make very precise natural language processing-based text mining results available interactively to non-expert >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Great. How far does this bring us to? You mentioned that you went up to $25 million with no outside financing. Would these two major strategic approaches cover that 0 to $25 million journey?

John Pope: That gets us to $25 million. We’ve always had a broad appeal. Our product works for 99% of the businesses out there. The vertical and the channel program really helped us to get to that $25 million mark.00

Sramana Mitra: You introduced this in about 2010? >>>

Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business.

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

Roger Hale: I think I had quite a normal upbringing. I grew up in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. My mother came from >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did it impact the revenues? How long did it take for you to start producing really strong multipliers on your revenue numbers using the channel?

John Pope: It had an immediate impact. We were starting from nothing back then but we’ve built a third of our business through the indirect channel. We’re a company that’s nearing $100 million in revenue and about a third of that has come through our reseller channel.

Sramana Mitra: That’s one of the major strategic initiatives that produced. Were there other inflection points it

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Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s got into the block-by-block journey of how you got to $25 million. What were some of the first strategic moves that you made that set you up for that journey? Just walk me through the strategic process of navigating through to $25 million.

John Pope: The first one was a lesson that I’ve already covered here. You have to keep your expenses to a minimum. We all did that at that time. The second piece was to reinvest heavily into growth. If we had wanted to wait and continue to work on our product endlessly until we were satisfied with every last bell and whistle, we would not have survived. The strategy was to reinvest into sales and into lead generation. >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where there is something wrong is this crazy glamorization of unicorns and fundraising. That is really unhealthy and it is really destroying the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

John Pope: I completely agree. In closing on that, what I didn’t want to do was have a business and then stop working hard. Maybe this will resonate with you. A lot of people or so-called business advisors want to tell people to run your own business so that you can have all sorts of free time and have all sorts of money and be less industrious. I think it’s ridiculous that people do that. It’s almost like the get rich quick mentality. Don’t start a business so that you cannot work. Start a business because it’s who you are. >>>

10 Entrepreneurs Who Bootstrapped to Millions in Podcasts

If you have been putting off moving forward with your own startup venture due to a lack of financing, please listen to this series of podcast interviews with some successful startup founders who managed to bootstrap their businesses to millions in revenue. Each of these 30-minute podcast interviews tells the inspiring story of how they did it.

Girish Navani, CEO at eClinicalWorks – Bootstrapped a billion dollar Unicorn with a paycheck. Girish didn’t quit his job for two years, while he tested and validated his original product and customer base. He now has built a $300 million revenue company that is still 100% bootstrapped, private, and has no desire to sell out or go for an IPO.

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