Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 1)

Following up on our ‘Bootstrapping Using Services‘ and ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ case studies, here’s the story of PhishMe, a cyber security company that has scaled nicely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Rohyt Belani: I am originally from India. I was born and raised in India. I was there till the age of 22. I did my engineering in India.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India are you from?

Rohyt Belani: Bombay. I came to the US to pursue my graduate studies at Carnegie-Mellon back in 2000. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Aytekin Tank, CEO of JotForm (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were you seeing the same kind of conversion levels from free to premium?

Aytekin Tank: I can’t actually recall the numbers right now.

Sramana Mitra: This is a very big question. Whenever people are doing freemium products, it’s a question that we ask. It’s something that people are trying to understand. What are the dynamics of a freemium business. It seems like your business is a freemium business. You’ve talked quite a bit now about the benefits of releasing your first product as a free product. Really, the way to make a business work out of that is that conversion rate. It’s a critical issue in this interview that we should cover. In your second year, you did have a freemium product. You were actually monetizing in 2007. You had three products in 2007 that were all in that freemium mode?

Aytekin Tank: Subscription businesses like SaaS start very slowly. With the free version of JotForm, we had a $9 premium version. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Aytekin Tank, CEO of JotForm (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did the market accept that you had a better product?

Aytekin Tank: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Who were the competitors that you faced at that point?

Aytekin Tank: JotForm came out in February 2006. Before that, there were many forms products. All these products had old interfaces. Most of them are not very popular these days. After JotForm came out, some really good products came out. This was back in 2006. That was an important time for many web applications because there were many new things that were possible.

Sramana Mitra: How were you acquiring customers? Was it organic search, paid search, or online digital marketing? How were you finding customers?
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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Aytekin Tank, CEO of JotForm (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level when you quit your job and went full-time with the business?

Aytekin Tank: It was a little higher than my salary, but it wasn’t too high.

Sramana Mitra: I can’t gauge from that. What are we talking? Are we talking $10,000 a month?

Aytekin Tank: It was less than that.

Sramana Mitra: So somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 a month is what you were making from the business?

Aytekin Tank: Yes. I don’t think I can give revenue numbers because one, it was so long ago. I might not remember the exact numbers correctly. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Aytekin Tank, CEO of Jotform (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study my free Bootstrapping course. 

Aytekin is a Turkish entrepreneur who has bootstrapped his company with a paycheck. He has used a freemium business model, and a virtual team strategy to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Aytekin Tank: I was born in Istanbul. I spent my childhood moving from city to city since my family worked for the government. Constantly having to adapt and make friends instilled in me an appreciation for different cultures and meeting new people. We have offices in San Francisco and in Turkey. We have remote workers in 20 countries.

Sramana Mitra: You spent your childhood in Turkey, then?
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Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 6)

Ernie Bray: The challenge we found with virtual workforce was that some people just don’t fit well in that model because they get distracted too much. They don’t focus on what they’re doing. Because we’re a results-oriented company, we have our computer technology in our platform, we can monitor pretty much whether they’re getting the job done. We use Slack for communication. We use Skype a lot. We communicate through our technology platform itself. If you institute the right tools, you can create a pretty cohesive distributed workforce, but it really goes back to having the right people who can do that.

Sramana Mitra: It takes a lot of self-discipline. Do you have a lot of people working from home? You said you have 12 people working at headquarters. Do you have a second office?

Ernie Bray: No. We have to have accounting. Accounting is in the headquarters. We have quality assurance in the headquarters and some administrative staff.

Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to build this company in an organic way. Talk to me a bit about that decision.
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What Are Some Misconceptions About Bootstrapping A Business?

Big time misconceptions:

1. That bootstrapping is only for losers that can’t get investors.

2. That bootstrapping is a short term band-aid to hold you and your business together.

3. That bootstrapping is always painful and everyone around you must share in that pain.

In reality, bootstrapping is a viable and prudent strategy for most businesses.

For certain businesses it is the only strategy.

With rare exceptions, making a business viable always takes longer than anyone ever expects.
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Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, you were at about $1.2 million in revenue. In 2009, you were already on Inc. 5000. What was the revenue ramp?

Ernie Bray: In 2009, we went to $8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Ernie Bray: We’re pushing towards $15 million. We also made Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. We made that four years in a row.

Sramana Mitra: I’m more interested in the mechanics of how you did all this. In that period of 2009 to 2015, what are some of the other strategic moves and inflection points in the business?

Ernie Bray: The biggest challenge for our business was transitioning from a cohesive small team of maybe seven to eight employees to finally making that step to becoming more corporate and actually having to institute more policies and procedures. When you’re a small company, >>>