Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you find?

Joshua March: Many things. Like I said, we took this agile approach where we said, “What’s the simplest and fastest thing that we can do to start testing this out and start learning?” We sat down and built a Facebook page moderation tool. We had all these big brands and agencies who had these pages but were struggling to manage that. We can build a simple tool in a couple of months. We worked very quickly to do that. The result was awesome. There were a lot of brands who really loved it. So we kept building and developing.

Sramana Mitra: Did you give this product out for free?

Joshua March: Yes. We were just focused on learning at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in 2009?

Joshua March: In 2009, we suddenly find ourselves with this prospering agency. In 2008, I managed to pay off all of my debts and move into my apartment. I never set out to build an agency. I was much more excited by the possibility of building a software product that we could scale up. That was the original vision, but we were sidetracked by this awesome opportunity. I still had this vision of building a big business. I was also thinking a lot about the future. Are Facebook apps still going to be around in couple of years? I was not sure. At that time, I didn’t think that Facebook believed they were the future of the Internet. Although there was a lot of excitement around the applications and the campaign, I felt like a lot of that was because it was the latest. It was exciting and innovative, but I wasn’t really sure how much of it was tied to fundamental business value. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did that mean? You wanted to build products using the Facebook API. Did you have an idea what kind of a product you were going to build?

Joshua March: Facebook wasn’t the ruler of the world just yet. Myspace was still big. The consultancy gig that we were doing allowed us to do stuff on Facebook and also on these other social networks. It wasn’t completely clear that Facebook was going to dominate the world. Whilst we were doing these consultancy gigs on the side, my business partner Dan and I had the idea of building this product that would enable you to write an application once and then launch it on all of the social networks at the same time. We started working on that product while we were doing a lot of these Facebook gigs. It wasn’t big money at that time but there was a lot of people who were interested in it. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 2)

Joshua March: I set out to build this business with no real mentors and no experience on how to do e-commerce. I managed to get off the ground and have a small, live business. I even hired a team to build a website. Then the financial crisis happened. The whole saga lasted for about a year and a half, ending with my failure.

At that time, I didn’t have any idea about raising money from investors or venture capital. I certainly wasn’t getting any more money from the bank. I had to shut down the company before I graduated. It was a painful experience. I was very lucky that I never had to make the company go bankrupt. The bank had a lot of losses due to the financial crisis and knew that they weren’t going to get much of their money from me. They basically allowed me to shut the company down and walk away from the loan without liquidating it. I took on all the other debts myself. I spent the next couple of years paying off all the other vendors. I thought I’d be a billionaire, instead I was in tons of debt. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 1)

Josh March first built a digital marketing agency around social media before identifying the product opportunity for Conversocial.

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

Joshua March: I grew up in a relatively small town in England, a few hours outside of London. It’s called Malvern, Worcestershire. It’s famous for classical music composer Elgar. It has beautiful hills and countryside. It’s a lovely place to grow up but not completely exciting from a business perspective or the perspective of a 16-year-old.

I studied an undergrad law degree at college. I really wanted to be a barrister, which is a type of lawyer in England. That really attracted me. My family were lawyers and I was very interested in it. I didn’t really know anything particular about business. Entrepreneurship wasn’t part of my experience growing up. I went to college at Durham University. I was thinking I was on a pretty clear career path. >>>

When to Quit While Bootstrapping with a Paycheck

My recent book “Bootstrapping With A Paycheck” offers a close look at a mode of entrepreneurship that has become a major trend. Entrepreneurs are starting companies in droves while still holding onto their full-time jobs.

Two interviewers, Amina Elahi from The Chicago Tribune and Katherine Harvey from Union Tribune San Diego, asked me the same question: If you are bootstrapping a startup with a paycheck, when is the right time to quit?

Here is what I told them:

Q: How can an entrepreneur know when it’s time to make the leap to full-time self-employment?

A: This is a personal choice that depends on your life circumstances, but at the minimum, you should definitely validate your business idea and determine whether it’s going to generate money. Talk to customers and make sure they’re buying. And keep in mind that most venture capitalists will not fund you until you’re running your business full-time. Before you go out to raise money, you’re going to need to quit your day job.

>>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You raised $15 million in this round?

William King: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s all the financing that you have raised so far?

William King: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about how you framed TAM for your business. What is the TAM model that you’ve been using?

William King: I’ll just give you a couple of numbers here. The worldwide pharmaceutical market was worth $956 billion two years ago. It will be well over a trillion dollars now. We looked at the revenues from a cost standpoint. How are they being generated? In particular, what we looked at is a >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This, by the way, is also a trend. For the longest time, the buyers of IT were IT departments of corporations. Today and going forward, the buyers are much more going to be the business users. The marketing department, for instance, is becoming a huge buyer of IT and other departments as well. Everywhere in the organization, there are SaaS capabilities that address specific problems. The uptake of SaaS solving specific business workflows is huge outside of IT. IT is no longer the largest buyer of information technology.

William King: I love hearing that. You get to look across the landscape. That’s certainly what we hope. We’re seeing it in our buyers, but I love that that’s a trend. Another thing that we’ve done that I’m so proud of is we democratized the data. First of all, we wrangle all the data. We do all the heavy lifting. For the BI tools, when you talk to people who use them, they say, “75% to 80% of our time is spent wrangling the data.” 15% to 25% of the time, they’re actually looking at it and analyzing it. What we’ve been able to do is take that effort out and then present it in a way that a business user can make good use of. That is so powerful. That is where we get a lot more buyers. >>>