Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Mike Oeth: 2002.

Sramana Mitra: Where were you located? Still in Connecticut or had you moved out by now?

Mike Oeth: At that point, I had moved down to Yardley, Pennsylvania. RCN is based in Princeton, New Jersey; so for a while, I was commuting from Connecticut down to Princeton. Eventually, we left RCN and went with a small startup out of Livingston, New Jersey in 2002. That’s where I met Rob Wolpov. Rob has a degree from Columbia. He was handling the product development and there, I was handling customer service. Once Rob and I met, we launched a company that got bought by a company out of New York. Eventually, we got together with John and started Junction Networks in 2004. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 1)

The theme of entrepreneurs building robust companies without outside capital continues in the story of OnSIP.

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

Mike Oeth: I was born in the MidWest, specifically in Speedway, Indiana. It’s the home of Indianapolis 500. I was very lucky in my early life to have three mentors who helped shape different parts of who I am. First, obviously, is my dad. He is a mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. He’s retired now but he had worked for General Motors. He was designing aircraft engines. He was very supportive when, in the seventh or eighth >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape when it came to keywords in AdWords. It sounds like that was a major channel and that did become very competitive.

Janine Popick: Brutal.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely, brutal is the word.

Janine Popick: You’re competing with people who can spend a lot more money. That’s what it comes down to. Any of these guys are getting $10,000 to $100,000 a month from their customers. We’re getting either free or $10 a month. It’s one of the reasons why Vertical Response decided to release a freemium product to let the freemium do the marketing for us. We launched that product a year and a half ago. We needed to compete. It was fine in 2005 to 2007. These days, the term email marketing is brutal. >>>

Bootstrapped Unicorns

Excerpt from my new Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns:  

In the fall of 2007, I met Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, for the first time. At that time, no one had heard of him. He was flying under the radar of Silicon Valley. Sridhar had a small network management tools business that basically functioned as a highly profitable cash cow. It was not an earth shattering idea. But it gave him cash to play with.

And play he did. He decided to go after Salesforce.com with a Software-as-a-Service Customer Relationship Management product at a price-point that was one sixth of what Salesforce.com, the market leader, charged. He offered the product to small businesses, and customers lapped it up.
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So all the selling that you do around the world is done through your Spanish operation. You sell on the phone and web.

Alicia Asin: Yes, most of the sales are direct sales due to inquiries through our websites. This year, we started opening distribution channels. Now, we have existing distributors covering most of the European territory, Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, and US as well. This list is growing every month.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I think I’ve got your story. Is there anything else you want to share?
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Other than universities, are there any other vertical trends that you see in terms of kinds of companies – retail, logistics, or healthcare? Where are you seeing the projects?

Alicia Asin: Because we are a horizontal platform, we have customers not only in universities but also in system integrators and communication companies.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. This is more of a trend question. What kinds of killer apps are you seeing? What segments are coming up with IoT killer apps than others.

Alicia Asin: The first one is Smart cities. It’s a dynamic segment in the IoT. It’s surprising that agriculture seems to be a mature market where we also have a lot of innovators willing to test technologies.
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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what else is strategic in your story of building this company. What other strategic moves have you made that are worth discussing in an interview like this?

Ricky Joshi: One thing I would say is we do nothing normal. Every single thing that we’ve done has been different. Our marketing has been more creative. I don’t mean branding. We’re just smarter about stuff. For example, if you type mattress, you’ll see a bunch of white beds. We put in branded shops with backgrounds that stand out. I’ll give you another example. This is pretty nuanced. The way AdWords works is you set a radius around an area. A lot of times you’re setting LA or New York. But our customer doesn’t necessarily live at the same zip codes. We actually went and took the average home value of a radius around every city and put a modifier on average home value to target zips as opposed to targeting city areas. We do stuff like that all the time.

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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are these people in your payroll the people who are doing the delivery?

Ricky Joshi: It depends.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like a very expensive infrastructure. That’s what I’m struggling with. For a bootstrapped company, to roll out that kind of infrastructure is rather difficult. Help me reconcile.

Ricky Joshi: We’re doing $25 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Still, that full logistics infrastructure around the country is expensive.

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