Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s your experience. We work with a very large number of entrepreneurs. Not everybody comes from a company where they’ve already seen a problem unsolved and then they go after that. You had a lot of your validation and probing done while you were already at Siperian and Informatica. You built upon that to go after a very similar customer base.

The process of finding the right solution is not always such a direct path for entrepreneurs. There’s more experimentation involved in a lot of cases than you have experienced because your path was more direct. The general methodology of bootstrapping using services worked for you and that’s something that we recommend heavily to entrepreneurs. Generally, it works the best for enterprise clients.

Let’s come back to where you got traction. Where was the initial traction coming from? >>>

Bootstrapping with Angel Money: Josh Levy, CEO of BeenVerified (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007 when you started with this concept, did you raise money? Did you bootstrap? How did you get the business off the ground?

Josh Levy: We bootstrapped it for a couple of months. My co-founder and I were working out at his house in his living room. Right around the time when I left my last job in finance, I told my boss what I was doing. He actually wrote the first check for $200,000 to get us started. We moved to New York City and got an office in the New Yorker Hotel. Our first office was actually a hotel-turned-office space. We brought on a CTO as our first hire who is actually my CTO in my second startup.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you were planning to do this verification? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you pick a vertical to go after or were you doing it more horizontally at this point?

Manish Sood: We did narrow down on the life sciences vertical because we had seen some adoption from a SaaS perspective. But we were also approaching customers outside that vertical to understand where the potential opportunities might exist. During this whole process, we were still developing it as a horizontal technology because that was a part of the vision from the very beginning. Although from a go-to market point of view, we wanted to focus on just one vertical so that we could penetrate that vertical and get revenue out of it. >>>

Bootstrapping with Angel Money: Josh Levy, CEO of BeenVerified (Part 1)

Building businesses has become cheaper by several orders of magnitude. Josh Levy and his team took just over $2 million in angel financing, and has built a profitable business in New York. For those entrepreneurs facing the Series A crunch, this is an important story to follow. You will do fine if you have patient angels, and just use their investment to bootstrap to profitability.

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?

Josh Levy: I was born in New Jersey. I went to high school in New Jersey. I went to the University of Maryland for college where I got an undergraduate degree in Finance. I also did a minor in entrepreneurship. I now live in Brooklyn. BeenVerified is headquartered in New York City. I’ve been on the East Coast my whole life. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re trying to do that, are you then saying that you are going out into the social web to pull all that data? For instance, my private bank is Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley doesn’t have any of that information unless they go into my LinkedIn graph.

Manish Sood: Even before you go to the LinkedIn graph, there is a lot of information within the bank itself. For example, when you bank with Morgan Stanley, they have information on the different kinds of accounts that you have. You’ve already provided information about who’s the beneficiary on those accounts. If you have a trust, who’s the trustee? Who’s the lawyer on that trust? You have also probably provided your place of employment. There is public information available about who else works at that organization. If you start connecting those dots even without stepping into Facebook or LinkedIn type of social media sites, there is a lot of information that sits within these enterprise organizations, but it’s in different silos and different applications. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were the circumstances of founding this company? Who was involved besides yourself? What kind of financing did you do? Give me a bit more of the entrepreneur journey in the beginning.

Manish Sood: In the early part of 2011, myself and my co-founder sat down and talked about the idea. At that point in time, it was merely an idea in my head in terms of what we wanted to solve and provide as a solution to our customers. Doing it alone wasn’t a possibility. The first starting point was to look for like-minded people who would be able to invest their time and help us solve this kind of a problem from the ground up. That’s when I pulled in one of my earlier co-workers into the fold. One of the first things we started doing was reach out to potential customers.

Even before we created our product, the first step was to validate the opportunity and to look at if there would be customers who would be willing to pay for that. In fact, one of our first starting point wasn’t by going out and raising capital. It was by raising support from the partners and >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 2)

Manish Sood: Consider how these customers look at engaging with their customers, vendors or gathering any kind of competitive information around products they are selling in the market. All of these different types of problems, whether it’s customer loyalty, customer experience, or customer engagement, requires you to think about bringing data together from multiple sources— both internal and external, regardless of whether it is master data or the interactions that are taking place.

More often, we started seeing the pattern that the customers today may start out with a specific point of view, but that point of view evolves quite rapidly as their businesses evolve. A simple example of what we saw in the market was the work that life sciences companies were doing. Their business model of going out and selling directly to the prescribers was morphing quite rapidly into a very complex account-based sales process. They now had to not only understand the information about the prescribers that they were engaging with, but they also had to figure out how best to go and get their drugs on the formulary list that was being provided on a specific plan by a provider and used by large, >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 1)

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

Here’s yet another case in point in our Bootstrapping Using Services series. Manish is scaling Reltio super fast at this point, and has raised venture capital, consistent with our theme Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later.

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?

Manish Sood: I was born in the northern part of India. I grew up and went to school there. I went to an engineering college in the southern part of India, which was a new experience for me from a location perspective and getting acclimatized to the overall culture and environment. >>>