Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 1)

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Taylor has bootstrapped Wiredrive over a 17-year period to about $10 million. Today, he has options ahead to grow organically or raise money. Either way, an interesting journey.

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?

Taylor Tyng: I was born south of Boston, Massachusetts in a town called Duxbury. I was born the son of two entrepreneurs who went through a line of businesses from early plastic mold injection technology companies and ended up working in a luxury travel business. I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early. I was raised in a middle class setting and my parents made sure that they raised children who were thoughtful and mindful. I had a real good platform to practice >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking when you became profitable?

Guy Mucklow: It was four years after we started, so 2005. It’s interesting because it begs the question of going down the VC route or bootstrapping. Increasingly, a lot of tech entrepreneurs that I meet who have taken funding regret doing that. I know you’re in the game, so you see the value of it.

Sramana Mitra: In our program, there is a very clear philosophy that you bootstrap first and raise money later, or not at all.

Guy Mucklow: I think that makes total sense, because I have seen so many startups start with a view of almost a load of mud, throwing it at a wall, and seeing what sticks. They’ve not been very pragmatic. If you’re living off your own capital, you are more careful about it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s try to accelerate and cover a bit more of the story so that it’s a complete story. What is the next major strategic move or inflection point where your business accelerates and what was the driver? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you selling for? What was your business model and pricing model? How were you monetizing your product?

Guy Mucklow: I might have mentioned earlier that we had two main licensing models in the early days because we saw mass market potential for this kind of service. We looked to go down a very lightweight transactional base licensing model. Let’s say $50 would buy you a thousand lookups. Those lookups would be valid for a 12-month period.

Our customer would come to us. They would buy the credit packs. We would get paid upfront. That model still exists today. The typical experience for our customer was that they would buy online and get invoiced online. That invoice information was being stored against their account. When it came to renewals, >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions on this. First, talk to me about your freemium strategy. What did you offer for free and what did you offer for premium?

Christian Vanek: What we offer for free now is probably too much. That comes back down to the cultural problems in my organization. I tend to undervalue software so we tend to give a lot of it away. One way that we competed against the other freemium products was we didn’t limit the number of responses you could collect. We didn’t limit the number of questions or pages. We’ve tried various mixes over the years. That made us incredibly popular because you could do so much with our software. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that your main competitive strategy in winning accounts that would use your software for their sales enhancement process was to find them through different channels where you were not facing competitors?

Guy Mucklow: Largely. I guess, it was also about the way in which we sold. We had a major focus on delivering an incredibly good self-serve customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I would like to hear a little bit about is the product-side differentiation. You talked about finding touch points with customers where you had less competition. Was there product-side differentiation also?

Guy Mucklow: There have been two major product innovations in our business. If I can relate it back to the overall vision of the business, which is to >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you that you rank in the first three search results for survey software. As you said, there is lots of competitors. Why do people buy your software over your competitors? What is the key positioning point that you win on?

Christian Vanek: We serve two markets. The first market is definitely price sensitivity for function. We’re not the cheapest. Over the last 10 years, it’s also about building name recognition. Early on, there weren’t quite as many competitors as there are now. That helped us. The only ones that did appear had problems. One of the things we heard early on was that the name of the survey software mattered because they wanted people to take them seriously. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you sell. Whom were you selling to? What was the sales decision making cycle?

Guy Mucklow: Our main target audiences were e-commerce businesses. Another really important learning and a key theme that underlines and underpins our whole business is about choosing your routes to market very carefully. Most of our competitors tend to congregate in certain channels and markets. We made a conscious decision to power our own furrow – to be a business that went against the grain. One of my first trade shows had around five or six of my competitors there.

Being the sixth or seventh conversation, it didn’t matter how well differentiated our technology was to everyone else’s. When you’re the sixth conversation in that chain, everyone is thinking exactly the same about you. Everything tends to merge into one. What we did was we chose a number of specific trade shows to >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was about to ask you about the commercial terms that you negotiated with the company that was giving you all this input about what to build. How did you structure the terms?

Christian Vanek: The terms were very simple. It was a gentleman’s agreement to be honest and we still are upholding it today. That organization could use SurveyGizmo for free forever, provided that they kept the “Powered by” byline. All of those other individuals that I was introduced to worked for organizations all across the United States, from very tiny market research firms to large publishing firms. These folks also had that same deal: Help me build the software and you get the software. They were so excited about the prospect that they were very involved in it and helped develop all of the initial features.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first paying customer for the service customer? >>>