Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the business was starting to become more of an enterprise business from there on.

Steve Liu: Very much so, yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did it scale? 2008 was when you made the transition to the new CEO. Between 2008 and 2014, what are the milestones and scaling strategies that you deployed?

Steve Liu: I think the big things that happened during that time were that we shored-up the product where the product just can’t meet expectations, and we put money and resources in making the product rock solid. Then, it was just building up and hiring. These days, we’re about 160 employees.

Sramana Mitra: All in Atlanta?

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Was the company based in Washington?

Steve Liu: In Atlanta, actually. The hospital medicine job that I got was in Atlanta.

Sramana Mitra: I see. You recruited a CEO who would run the company in Atlanta?

Steve Liu: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find this person? What was the criteria and process of finding this person?

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone? How far did you go with the angel financing?

Steve Liu: We grew and then there was a point where we needed more formal funding from an institutional investor. That’s when we brought in Buckhead Investment. They came in about nine years ago. The initial round was a couple of hundred thousand.

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet them and why did you go with them?

Steve Liu: One of the smart things we did early on was hiring a retired advertising executive as a marketing director. It was that classic awesome market where you’ve got folks who were C suite of their own companies but they’ve retired and want to stay in the mix of things. This guy had his own firm. He just wanted to keep his feet wet. I’m not sure how we met him but we hired him as our advertising executive. He would work for us >>>

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in your first year?

Steve Liu: I honestly do not remember. It’s been so long. Over the first few years, we quickly got to a couple of thousand users. During that time, we enhanced the product and started increasing the price. Pretty quickly, we got a lot of clients—enough for a startup at least.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always helpful for us to know the pace at which a startup is scaling because when you’re recommending strategies, there’s also metrics that help validate what is really happening. Was it just you or were there other people in the company at that time?

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the specs that they wanted?

Harman Singh: There was a technology called Smile technology for education programs that wanted to deliver video-based along with some other content. These days, people would not know what that is. But in those days, it was really hot. We worked with professors and discuss what they needed. They had recording studios and we were the programming guys who put the whole thing together by integrating instructional design with technology. That’s when I got close to streaming media whether it’s real-time or video streaming. I was an engineer at that point but I learned a lot of about how business is done. I got into sales and project management. Those few years, we sold to many customers including our university.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was around the Smile technology of real networks to deliver video content?
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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You programmed your PalmPilot to have that available as a mobile application. You presented at this conference and everybody wanted it.

Steve Liu: Pretty much, yes. That was when we figured out we might have something. A few months later, we put up a booth. I was a physician. I just wanted to be a physician, but this took a life of its own. I actually talked to my parents. I said, “Mom, I think I have a company here. I think I have to do this, but I have no idea about businesses.” She thought I was crazy, but she also knew that I made that big decision to become a physician at the last minute. They supported me.

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 1)

We just launched out Bootstrapping With A Paycheck book, the 11th volume in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. Here’s yet another instance of a very successful company being built in this mode.

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

Steve Liu: I was born in the United States. I was born in DC and lived in Virginia my whole life. My parents were immigrants but not your typical immigrants. My father came to UVA for his undergraduate studies. I grew up pretty typical with Asian parents. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

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Five Entrepreneurs Who Bootstrapped Their Startups With A Paycheck

Bootstrapping your startup while holding onto a full-time job is plenty viable. We have numerous examples of very successful companies that were built in this mode.

Here are five entrepreneurs whose stories will give you lots of inspiration:

1. Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks: Girish has since built one of the leaders in cloud-based healthcare IT solutions including practice management, EMR, etc. The company forecasts over $300 million in revenue in 2014. Read my February 2010 Entrepreneur Journeys interview with him here. Also, a recent follow-up interview is here.
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