Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find your investors?

Manick Bhan: Most of the investors that we were connected to came through our networks. Along the way, we went to various events. I don’t recommend going to all of the tech events, but sometimes, some of them are good. You know which ones are good because those are the ones that your entrepreneur friends are recommending. If you’re in New York, the New York Tech Meetup is one of the best meetups in the city about announcing cool technology. There are always investors there. There are always cool entrepreneurs there much more successful than you have been. We’re able to build together a network.

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Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Manick Bhan: We figured out how to rub these two stones together and kept building up this small fire. We were doing maybe $50,000 in sales a month and slowly growing. By the end of the year, we had hit $1 million ARR (Annual Revenue Rate). In that process, we focused on the two fundamentals of what it takes for the solution to be successful. Understanding organic search is hugely important. You can’t just read it online and learn it. You have to be doing it and running experiments. We were running several experiments. >>>

Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get back to the specifics of how you did it. Now that you are in the market, you have figured out that you can get to a million dollar run rate. What was the reason why people were buying from you versus these other players? You had all kinds of hypothesis intellectualizing before you started, but what did you learn from the market?

Manick Bhan: In that time, the only goal we had was, “Can we analyze the things that are happening with our users and our app?” What percentage of them are buying? When are they buying? The thing is we had a little bit of spark. All we were doing is we were gathering around this flame and just trying to study it. We were just studying all these details.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you a specific detail from that lot. Why were they buying from you? This is one of the fundamental positioning questions that people need to ask? Why? >>>

Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get your MVP out? Before you got any seed funding, I take it that you had to get an MVP launched and get some customers going.

Manick Bhan: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s how the industry works. There are exceptions. Usually, first-time entrepreneurs are not exceptions. I’m just trying to see if you had to go the normal route.

Manick Bhan: It was the opposite. It was the most unexceptional way to build a product. I believed, naively, that our launch would be two months away. I invested some of my own capital. It didn’t really take that much in the early days. As far as starting a company goes, it was not a whole lot. I had some family and friends put in some money. It was just enough to get some initial stuff going. >>>

Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 3)

Manick Bhan: At a high level, the preparation included me learning how to code. I had spent about nine months on that. I spent a lot of time in my apartment staring at a blinking cursor on a black background. Every time I hit an error, I put that error into Google to figure out what the answer was. I just did that over and over again until I built my first computer program. My first computer program was to download music from Spotify as an API. I was downloading all the tracks and saving it to a database. That took me maybe a day and a half to learn how to do it from start to finish. After that, I just kept going. Do you play a musical instrument, by any chance?

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I play the piano.

Manick Bhan: Do you remember in the early days when you were learning how if you practice for a week, you can become twice as good? >>>

Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 2)

Manick Bhan: Just a few years after that, you had these rumblings of the next big tech boom. When Facebook went public, it was an incredible experience to see a company that had grown up quietly and become so huge and valuable. At the same time, that same roommate who infected me with the finance bug ended up going to tech.

A year after leaving Duke and working on a tech company, he sold it for $10 million. It was clear that there was an opportunity in tech. I didn’t really understand that until he sold his company. He helped me understand what’s happening in technology. At that time, I wasn’t a technical person. I was always good with computers. As I said, taking things apart was my forte. I didn’t have all the skills I needed but I had the curiosity. Now, I’m the CTO of Rukkus and I can code in almost any language.

At that time, I didn’t know how to do that. This was maybe two to three years ago. >>>

Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 1)

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

“My journey was as unexceptional as you can imagine,” says Manick, in describing how he got to $1 million Annual Revenue Rate in transactions before raising financing. Read on for the whole story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going back to your very beginnings. I want to hear about where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Manick Bhan: Both my parents come from Kashmir. They raised me in Baltimore, Maryland. That’s where I was born. I’ve grown up mostly in the United States. In the very early days, I liked to take things apart. When I was nine, they bought me this bicycle. The first thing I did was I opened the whole thing up. I took out all the screws and basically dismantled the beautiful bike. They were a little horrified about it because it was a birthday present. This has been pretty constant in my life. I like to take things apart and figure out how they work. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit the $1 million mark?

Shane Evans: I think we would have come just under it in 2013. In 2014, we would have been $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, you were at $1 million revenue. At that point, what was the distribution between professional services and actual product sales?

Shane Evans: In terms of revenue, it would have been heavily professional services.

Sramana Mitra: At what point did that start to shift? At what point were you able to get enough technology that you were able to start generating product revenues? >>>