Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At what point does the strategy change? You described one strategic change which went from pure services to multi-year contracts and then to reselling other people’s software. What’s the next major change in strategy?

Bill Moschella: The next major change in strategy happened somewhere around 2007 where the reselling of original equipment manufacturing of other people’s software actually became more attractive than doing any of the services work. We became system integrators as opposed to doing agency services. We’re still doing some of the agency services work, but it was a means to get to the selling of the software. We weren’t selling our own software yet. We were selling other people’s software. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started PMG as a services company in 1997 in Atlanta. What happens next?

Robert Castles: We had some pretty good success. We went through the whole Internet explosion and the dot-com startup era. We built a lot of very neat websites for companies ranging from Mitsubishi Wireless with an interactive cellphone on a web page over to The Varsity in Atlanta, which was very exciting to have a local account to work with. Then, we caught wind of the digital marketplace explosion and things really took off from there. We had quite a bit of growth in this B2B marketplace opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: You were building marketplaces for other people?

Robert Castles: That’s right. We had a fiber market and a steel market client. They were trying to forge new ground in digital marketplaces and we were building web applications to meet their needs. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 2)

Dave Elkington: I decided to quit and come back to school to get a master’s in Computer Science. The rationale was two-fold. One, I believed that coding was not that hard. It’s not as challenging as the programmers try to make it. We were paying, at that time, exuberant amounts for people who weren’t that qualified. At the same time, they weren’t delivering. Additionally, if we take a trip back to my undergraduate, what really enamored me about Philosophy was a subset around Set Theory, Logic, and Epistemology. I was really interested in the way people learn and categorize data. Specifically, I was interested in the Aristotelian view of the world—categorization of things. I had a philosophy around the way I believed people consume and aggregate data. I believe that, ultimately, it was a system versus something that can be organically built within the human brain.

As I decided to go back to college to get a master’s in Computer Science, I wanted to see if I could demystify code and technology. Even more importantly, I wanted to see if I could systematically and more importantly, algorithmically represent my philosophical theories that I’ve established. I came back to BYU to get a master’s in Computer Science. As you can imagine, I’m sitting in the office of the Department Chair and >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 1)

Yet another case study of a services company successfully bootstrapping a product, then raising Venture Capital!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of your entrepreneurial story?

Bill Moschella: I was born and raised in Connecticut. I attended college at Berklee and eventually got my degree. What I was passionate about all of my life was music. I went to music school and graduated with a music degree. I left college playing music in a band and opened up a recording studio. I never really had a job. I was always playing music. I was running bands. I found that I had a passion for the engineering side of music so I opened up a recording studio. I took all the money that I saved up from gigs. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 1)

The tried and true 1M/1M theme of Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later rings through Dave Elkington’s story. He used services to bootstrap a Unicorn that has since raised close to $140 million in VC funding. Revenue has scaled 100% year on year the last few years.

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

Dave Elkington: I grew up in Utah. I went to school here. My parents are both school teachers and worked for the state and federal government. It was a little bit atypical. My dad was a rancher growing up in Idaho. My mom is from Canada. When people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a millionaire. They would ask why. I’d be like, “Not for the money, but purely for the sake of accomplishment of being able to do that.” I went to school locally. My education is a little bit eclectic. I have an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. I also have minors in Hebrew, Japanese History, and Business. I also studied, for about a year, in Israel. I decided I wanted to go get some >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 1)

Adding to our roster of Bootstrapping Using Services case studies, here’s PMG from Atlanta.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Tell us a bit about where you come from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of background.

Robert Castles: I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. I spent the first half of my life there through to college. I have always been interested in technology as early as I can remember. When I was 11 years old, I begged my father for a Radio Shack Color Computer so that I could take it home and learn how to program. This is while all my friends were looking for baseball mitts, which I also like. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for that computer, which I got.

My dad then helped me get a job at 15 to write software for a small insurance company. I helped them out. They had a bunch of bad data and my job was to fix their data. I enjoyed that very much. It was a great opportunity. That set my life path moving forward. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to raise this $2.4 million, you had customers?

Joshua March: Yes, we had customers. It was still early on. We then sold the agency. In early 2012, we succeeded in selling the agency to a larger agency.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you get for the agency?

Joshua March: We don’t release the actual amount. It was a good number for us at that time. It wasn’t a billion dollar acquisition, but it was a great deal.

Sramana Mitra: I want to touch on the highlights of the Conversocial evolution. In 2011, you had product–market fit. You had $2.4 million in financing. What else happened in 2011 that is a highlight?
>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At that time when you were going through this thought evolution, I imagine you must have done some competitive analysis. All these companies like RightNow and people who came at it from the customer service side were also discovering that they needed to do this. They need to support customer service from the coming out of the social media channels. They were putting in gear solutions for that. How does that impact your thought process?

Joshua March: The prediction that I made using the framework of Innovator’s Dilemma was that all these companies will probably talk about social, but none of them would really invest in it in the way that was needed to create the product. Traditional customer service like email, phone, and live chat all have essentially the same framework and the same work flow process. They’re one-on-one private interactions between an agent and a customer where every single interaction that comes in is a service request. It’s all in platforms that are controlled by the company. Social media comes along and it’s completely different. First off, and most importantly, it’s no longer a private channel. A lot of it is public. It’s on a third-party platform, so it’s not controlled by the company. >>>