Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 1)

Jory Lamb started as an entrepreneur as a 23-year old in rural Canada. Read his 18-year journey.

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?

Jory Lamb: I grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. I was also born there. My dad was a schoolteacher and my mom ran local food stores called Red Roosters. We used to own three Red Roosters, which would be the equivalent of 7-11 stores in the late 70s to the mid 80s. I went on to the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with a business degree.

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 2)

Robin Wiener: I think the one thing about being an entrepreneur is that you always try to find what you like to do and see if you can make a career out of it. That’s what happened with recruiting for me. I found something I was passionate about and started following that. That took me to the IT world. All of a sudden, I’m recruiting for developers, project managers, and solution architects. With that, I’m learning about how technology can change people’s lives and what you can do with it.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this business?

Robin Wiener: I was the HR Director for USWeb from 1997 to 1999. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Anything that starts to validate and gets clients into a product is really a key milestone. In everything that we do, that milestone makes a humongous difference.

Ajay Patel: It was a turning point for us.

Sramana Mitra: In what year was that?

Ajay Patel: That was in 2006.

Sramana Mitra: At that time, what kind of services revenue were you doing?

Ajay Patel: I think our total revenue in those days was probably around £300,000.
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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 1)

Robin has built an excellent company with large, international clients in the healthcare domain and has used the bootstrapping using services technique that we espouse in 1Mby1M.

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

Robin Wiener: I’m from Connecticut. I was born in Bristol, the home of ESPN. I went to the University of Connecticut for college. Early on, I had a major speech problem. I couldn’t really pronounce things. Along with that, I had a major learning disability. I had two sisters and a brother. The teachers told my parents that I just wasn’t as smart as my brothers and sisters. Maybe I could get married and that would be a good thing for me to do. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of projects were you taking on during that time?

Ajay Patel: Development projects.

Sramana Mitra: So it had nothing to do with the legal industry?

Ajay Patel: Not much, to be honest.

Sramana Mitra: You got whatever you got and you did whatever you could get.

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 2)

Ajay Patel: The vision was to build our own deal room or file sharing application and then license that to the legal industry. We put in our savings, which amounted to $30,000 and started HighQ. To this day, it is still a bootstrapped company. Having no money meant no salary, but it also meant that you had to spend money on what you actually needed. What we needed was a development team. We went to India.

Thirteen years on, I have to say that was the best decision we made. Today, that team is almost 100 people. I feel that if we had started off with financing or had a lot of money behind us, we may have gone for UK. We couldn’t have scaled that dev team like we have done today. We just started with product development really.

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, we bring you a story from London.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Ajay Patel: I was born in London about 42 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. My origins are actually Indian. My father is from India and my mother was born in Fiji, but she’s of Indian descent.

Sramana Mitra: What about school? I imagine you went to school in London.

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: These two competitors that are heavily venture funded, what are their names? What is the situation right now? Are they comparable in revenue numbers? What metrics are you tracking for them?

Steve Liu: Good question. I don’t know their revenue numbers. It’s an interesting time in this market right now. One of them is PatientKeeper, which was recently acquired by a healthcare system. I don’t know where they stand but I do know that when it comes to what we do, we would always win the deal only because that was our focus. They were doing many different things on top of what we do. I don’t think they’ve had as much customer growth over the past years. We just didn’t see as many press releases. I’m not sure there’s as much adoption of the product when they rolled out. The other one is a company called MedAptus. These two are great companies but for some reason, we just do a slightly better job.

Sramana Mitra: You executed better and you were focused. It’s a wonderful story. What do you want to do next? Is money a lever that you can push to accelerate growth? Do you want to push that lever? What is your game plan?
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