Bootstrapping with Services from London: Gurman Hundal, CEO of Media IQ (Part 1)

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

Gurman has bootstrapped a fast growth company using services. Read about his impressive journey.

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?

Gurman Hundal: I was born in England in a town about 30 miles from London. My family is from the northern state of Punjab in India. Even though I was born in England, I couldn’t speak English till I was about six years old. I have a British-Indian upbringing. My parents owned their own shoe shop in a shopping mall near where we live. I got an early exposure to family-run organizations. I went through the educational system within England. I went to University of Kingston where I studied Business. It was there where I started my career. >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 2)

Adam Schwartz: While all this was happening, the woman I was working with had some interaction with that PR agency. After exhanging ideas, we came upon the pain point of being a sustainable fashion designer. There was a sustainable fashion movement. A lot of people in fashion wanted to make sustainable choices, but everything that came after making those choices was difficult, specifically, sourcing the actual textiles sustainably. If we can be a resource to fashion designers and brands around how to and where to source the textiles that they need to create their stuff, that would be an interesting business. That would reduce some of the friction to helping the fashion industry become more sustainable. We started that company together. It was called Source4Style. It was a B2B platform where fashion designers could source and actually purchase textiles from suppliers around the world in varying degrees of sustainability. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start selling products as opposed to just services?

Chris Taylor: We started that shift in 2010. The journey was a much longer one that I expected. We were running at our typical parent consulting margins of 20% to 40% depending on the project and the year. We decided that year that we’re going to roll all the profits back in. We’re going to stop trying to make a profit and invest in product development thinking that that would be a year turnaround on that investment. That transition took three and a half to four years to really make for a lot of reasons.

One, is it is hard to change the DNA of a company that has been doing consulting into one that’s focused on product. It’s not impossible like some people say, >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this when you were the only employee?

Chris Taylor: 2006. That’s how it started. For the first couple of years, I did a lot of different projects around the auto industry and also for a lot of startups out in the West Coast.

Sramana Mitra: You were consulting at that point?

Chris Taylor: Yes, I was consulting services and looking to develop products out of that. One of our values today is being customer-inspired. That comes from those early days where we would get in and learn our customer’s problems by being in the trenches with them and trying to extract a horizontal value proposition out of those. We had a couple of different products. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 1)

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

You know that we believe in the Bootstrapping Using Services methodology quite firmly. Here’s yet another story of how and why it works.

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?

Chris Taylor: I grew up in rural West Virginia. You won’t meet a lot of entrepreneurs out of West Virginia. When I was four, my father passed away, so my brother and I were raised by our mother. She did a fantastic job. My brother is also another entrepreneur. In college, I went to Carnegie-Mellon and studied Computer Science, Psychology, and Mathematics. >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the SaaS business.

Deal sizes are not going to be of scale. You’re selling software, so your average sales price is going to be a lot lower. The number of customers that you have to acquire is way larger, and people are not searching for freelance workforce management software. You have to find these customers somehow. How do you reconcile that?

Stephanie Leffler: The first thing is, from a price standpoint, I definitely recognize that a lot of SaaS platforms are relatively inexpensive. We have a slightly higher price point for our software because of the value that it does deliver. A customer who subscribes will be paying, at least, $100,000 for our entry-level >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork.

Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide a software that lets you manage them at scale.

Sramana Mitra: In this mode, what are the metrics of the business? How did the services business ramp up? How many customers and what kind of revenue? Once you switched a few months ago, what are the early metrics of the new format of the business?

Stephanie Leffler: We are so early with the new format that I don’t even have metrics that I can provide you. Our software went into beta two months ago. Our >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long have you sold the service?

Stephanie Leffler: We started in January 2011 – about five years.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about how this services business ramped up. Amazon was sending you people. You were managing their larger Mechanical Turk project using your platform. Did all leads come from Amazon or did you start marketing yourself?

Stephanie Leffler: In the beginning, all leads came from Amazon. We did start marketing ourselves. It’s funny. Thinking through the entrepreneurial journey, we found ourselves in a position where we never understood how good we had it in our first business with people searching online, finding exactly >>>