Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now you have cash. What happens next?

Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 1)

Rajesh Jain has built a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India. This is an important case study for all the bootstrapped entrepreneurs out there looking for inspiration and methodology to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Rajesh, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of background?

The Startup Velocity Question: Innovator’s Dilemma Kills Fundability

Say, you have a non-AI SaaS product with a $5M ARR. 

A competitor has come into the market with a new AI SaaS product addressing the same target customer.

You have to defend your turf and refurbish your SaaS product with AI to get the renewals. 

The Startup Velocity Question: Repeatability Drives Fundability

Founder-led sales is acceptable for the Seed round.

It is NOT acceptable for Series A or beyond.

At the minimum, you need a Repeatability Hypothesis to raise a sizable venture round.

Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you didn’t need to use the Twilio API or anything. It was getting the data straight directly off the smartphone.

Chris Sinkinson: Yes. The smartphone geolocation data has latitude and longitude that we would send to a web-based dashboard. The campus security team had a map that showed a pin of where the call was coming from. While you were on the call, it would update that location. So if you were moving, that pin would move and then they were able to relay that to their response team.

Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 1)

I always love Bootstrapping to Exit stories. Chris and his brother bootstrapped a wonderful startup and sold it for $40M. Read on for the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Chris, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of backgrounds?

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Segmentation

What problem does your product solve with a unique unfair advantage?

What ideal customer has that problem?

These questions are at the heart of Positioning.

The Startup Velocity Question: Segmentation Matters

An acute lack of understanding of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and an inadequate Market Segmentation result in artificially bloated TAM.

Often, Segmentation is too broad.

Let’s look at an example.