Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the product? Can you talk a bit more about what was the product that you took that long to build?

Senraj Soundar: A good sales representative working hard typically makes 60 to 80 dials on average, but he could talk to only three to four decision makers or prospects. The challenge is that it takes about 20 plus phone calls to get one person live on the phone. All the remaining 19 won’t go anywhere.

If you do the math, about 90% of the phone time is all wasted time for the sales rep. Only 10% of that phone effort yields a >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 1)

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

Senraj has bootstrapped his company to over $10M in revenue and is contemplating raising some growth capital now. He will, most likely, have numerous offers from investors. We love stories like this that reinforce our philosophy: “Do not go to VCs as beggars, go as kings!”

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?

Senraj Soundar: I was born and brought up in India, particularly in Southern India. I got my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 7)

Carl Ryden: Andi is every relationship manager’s dream analyst. She’s there with you in every deal. She sees what you’re doing. She sees your entire portfolio. She’s there with you to help you find ways to make that work better for the customer and the bank. How it came to be is, we had a great customer. The guy who bought our stuff and rolled it out is a guy called Andy Max. We were building functions and features and we would often find ourselves asking, “What would Andy tell the relationship manager?” One day, somebody said, “It would be great if we could just give everybody an Andy.”

So we built Andi. It seems silly, but it’s not. That idea was born a year ago. I can’t tell you how valuable that has been in the sales >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do and what model were you trying to reach?

Carl Ryden: There were a couple things that changed during that time. One is, the transactional sales people that we hired were not a good fit for our culture and how we operated. When we made changes, we wrote down our values. If you go to our website, you’ll see them. The quick summary is, “Be Helpful. Be Humble. Be Honest. Be Human.”

How those came to be is we saw a guy who gave a great talk on building company values. We were there just at this time when we >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You must have had a lot of relationships in that business since you were coming into this business trying to do something better than what you’ve done before. Did many of those relationships convert into paying customers?

Carl Ryden: Yes. We call them switchers. We get someone to switch from something they had before. It was good, but also not good. It was good, because you get money in the door and you get reference-able clients. It was also bad in that you never had to learn how to sell to new clients. It built in some bad habits. Eventually, we weaned ourselves off of switchers. I was somewhat against going after the switchers. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I need you to step through the process of building this company. Let’s start by zeroing in on the concept that you and Ken agreed on, and how you came up with that concept.

Carl Ryden: We started with a general framework of building a business where it has primary value through its use. Inventory is evil and Ken learned that in the vacuum cleaner business. It was going to be a software business. It was going to be SaaS.

We wanted not just a SaaS company, but we wanted something that, through the use of the tool, would generate valuable data that could >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to build?

Carl Ryden: I wanted to build software that helped manage configurations of home electronics. You can drag them on and it would tell you the best way to hook up your home stereo. It was called hookitupright.com. I built the application and put a lot of time and energy into it. We moved to Atlanta. I disassembled our things. I got a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and I can’t get this thing to work with remotes.

What I realized was it was terribly lonely – building something by yourself. I have a friend named Ken Garcia. I met him when I >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 2)

Carl Ryden: We did the Thinkpad 350, 425, 701 and all of that. It was great fun. It was one of the best teams I had ever worked on. While I was there, IBM shutdown the PC company and moved it to Raleigh. They moved all the notebook development to Yamato Labs in Japan, and we were shifted to desktop PCs. About half of our team ended up leaving IBM.

My second-line manager had left and convinced me to join him at a six-person startup company. I was employee number six. We were >>>