Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the focus? What drove the process of determining where you were going to focus?

Guy Mucklow: One of the things that we had done in trying to get PCA off the ground was to look at a piece of technology, which actually is very prevalent in the UK, around capturing data really quickly and simply. In the UK market, we have the benefit of an incredibly grand database, which is managed by the Royal Mail for the purposes of improving the efficiency of the postal delivery service. It’s got 29 million records in it. It contains pretty much every single address that exists in the UK. It’s updated very regularly.

Most people in the UK know their postcode. From a single postcode, you can get to a list of 20 to 30 addresses. One of which is likely to be yours. The Royal Mail had recognized that there was a market opportunity for them in being able to license this data to a technology community to enable them to build services around provisioning that data. The data itself, as provided by the Royal Mail, comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s actually a real nightmare to deal with. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you burn the $200,000 on?

Guy Mucklow: Partly salaries and technology. Though we were building a lot of stuff ourselves, we needed infrastructure to support the service we were building. If you look back on those times, you think, “Why on earth did I do that?” We spent $50,000 on just building a business plan and using a third-party consultancy to build that business case and put a great presentation to enable us to go out.

Sramana Mitra: You learn. You don’t know what the priorities are. I’ve been through that. I know exactly what you are talking about.

Guy Mucklow: It’s about priorities. We just didn’t realize what the key priorities were for us. In hindsight, spending a quarter of your capital on a strategy plan was absolutely nuts. It’s one of those things. It seemed right at that time. Everyone was doing it. I don’t even remember the name of the company. It seemed to be the right thing to do at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the evolution of your career as a software programmer in this travel services company?

Christian Vanek: I worked on building the system for that conference company. Then the parent company asked me if I’d like to join them as an actual official developer. I was given more of a traditional developer title. I was very young and I was in a team of about eight people. They decided that it would be useful if they gave me to their marketing team. I was the developer sacrificed to marketing!

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 1)

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

Guy has bootstrapped his company to $20 million, and last Christmas, turned down a $100 million acquisition offer. Read how he has navigated his venture.

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?

Guy Mucklow: I set my company up over 16 years ago when I was in my late 30s.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning.

Guy Mucklow: I was born and brought up in the UK. I went to university in the UK. I am a university dropout. I lasted a year and lost interest. A lot of people >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 1)

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

Christian has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read more about the strategies that have worked for him.

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?

Christian Vanek: I’m from upstate New York originally. I was born in 1977. Honestly, I moved around quite a bit. I never went to the same high school for more than a couple of years. In the end, I ended up in Massachusetts. After high school, I had no idea what to do with my life. I was not the best student ever. The >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: People do comparison shopping all the time.

Steve Yi: Exactly. Amazon does the same thing. When you look for a product on Amazon, they will actually have listings for competitive retailers. It’s a combination of insurance revenue and understanding that there is media revenue from your property that you can extract. In turn, it makes them a much more efficient marketer. If you’re spending $100 to get someone to come to your site and fill out a quote request, you can recoup 25% to 30% of that cost by having an advertising program. That’s money that you can then pour back into marketing and getting more consumers to your site. >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your operating expenses, how many people were involved and what kind of a P&L did you have to support within that operating margin?

Steve Yi: There was three of us. One person was working with us as a contractor who eventually became our VP of Sales.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers were you dealing with? Were these a small number of large customers?

Steve Yi: Within about three months, we were working with probably 8 to 10 auto insurance carriers and three advertising networks to monetize the traffic that we were acquiring.

Sramana Mitra: How did this work? You get a lead qualified and you would give that to all your customers? >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 5)

Steve Yi: We were fortunate to become profitable within the second month. For that first month, we thought we could never make that math work. We were losing a lot of money in that first month. It’s specific to this business. You just have to go through that period where you’re willing to lose money.

Sramana Mitra: You also have to experiment.

Steve Yi: Yes, exactly. Is the website converting? We have to put traffic to it to see if it converts. What keywords work well? Auto insurance was a particularly hard vertical to do this in because every click that you buy from Google was $20. It was very expensive to get users to our site. We were spending $20 and making $2 or $3 for a long time. Slowly but surely, you get a 5% improvement here, a 10% increase in what the advertisers are willing to pay you, and the math starts to work out.

Then you just keep at it and start to have some breakthroughs where you have a good portfolio of advertisers who are willing to pay you the right amount. You >>>