Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see is that the bigger disruption is in looking for systematic ways of being able to compensate influencers.

Reed Berglund: That’s one way of looking at it, absolutely. If you examine the initial goal for these influencers on these platforms, they were free platforms. They went on from a hobby standpoint. In many cases, they wanted to use it to market their own skill set whether that’s music, film, or art, but they didn’t approach it with, “I can actually make some money doing this.” To clear the market, there was definitely a need for a mechanism.

Sramana Mitra: How much money can an influencer, who participates in your campaign, expect to make in your sweet spot?

Reed Berglund: It depends on where that influencer is and the life cycle of their influence, if you will. For folks who have 250,000 to 500,000 followers on a platform, they can make anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000 per campaign. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did a McDonalds campaign like that yield you in terms of revenue? Are we talking about a $10,000 client or a $200,000 client?

Reed Berglund: That’s more in the neighborhood of a $100,000 client.

Sramana Mitra: Is that your sweet spot? Is that what you’re looking for as you’re building this business?

Reed Berglund: No, our ideal customer profile would be in the middle to smaller market. These are people who certainly do not have the budget of a McDonalds. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Walk me through a use case such that we can understand how the workflow operates here.

Reed Berglund: I’ll walk you through a program that we just did for Universal Music Group. This is a franchise that is about 25 years old. Its success came during the CD era, which was much different than the digital era of music. It’s a lot easier to sell a playlist. There are 53 albums in it and they continue to have some degree of success. They realized that they needed to cater to a consumer who was online and on Twitter and looking for downloads. Their challenge was to get people to download the album. They came to pop music fans on Vine and sourced those through our search engine. The influencers submit a video to be approved by Universal Music. It’s like Tinder. If you like the video, swipe left. If you don’t, swipe right. You then post the videos that you approved. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The company didn’t work out.

Reed Berglund: The company didn’t work out. We were ahead of the market. That’s one of the great lessons in my career. We were also trying to change buying behavior in a highly entrenched industry.

Sramana Mitra: What happened next?

Reed Berglund: We spun out of that company. One of the partners from that company was a global free-to-play gaming company called Miniclip. It was number one at that time. We launched it in the US to handle all of the sales, marketing, and licensing for Miniclip. From 2009 to 2013, I ran all of the monetization for Miniclip in the US. That brings us up to FullBottle, which was launched in June 2013. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, FullBottle is an interesting social media marketing venture that taps into the reach and engagement capacity of influencers to attract customers.

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 circumstances?

Reed Berglund: I was born in Manhattan and then moved to Los Angeles. I grew up in Los Angeles. I have a mixed European background and both my father and mother worked in media.

Sramana Mitra: What about school? Did you do all of it in Los Angeles?
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Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me understand the open source strategy a little bit better. You offer a portion of your technology as open source, right?

Mike Oeth: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a freemium open source model. You have other functionalities and features. It’s a classical commercial open source model.

Mike Oeth: Right. On top of that, we can provide a behind-the-scenes-service. You can use this software on your servers and it would work. You may need some consulting. At a certain point, if you want to scale this and get to a million users, you’re going to need a much more scalable platform. That’s where we would come in for the SIP.js. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting! What about financing? Did you, at any point, raise external financing?

Mike Oeth: We did not. We have stayed completely self-funded. We see ourselves as a software company and we’re lucky enough to have software margins. We’ve been cash flow positive since 6 to 12 months of starting. Rob does the marketing and the finance. He does an amazing job with our projections so know where we can expect our funds to be. We live within those means.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a bootstrapped company, basically?

Mike Oeth: Yes, we’re completely bootstrapped. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This went live in 2004?

Mike Oeth: The company went live in 2004. The OnSIP Hosted PBX was October 2006. It was actually nice not being funded by VCs. We had the flexibility to change our business plan and go out and see what was working and what wasn’t. The SIP Trunking was working, but we were getting more and more requests for hosted PBX from people who wanted just to have a couple of phones out there and not have their own version of Asterisk. We spent about a year developing OnSIP-hosted PBX and then we launched that around 2006. That has been our flagship product ever since. At this point, we’re getting about 35 sign-ups per day and with the PSTN gateway, we get about one a week.

Sramana Mitra: 2006 was when the hosted PBX was launched?
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