Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you finance the alpha and beta phases?

Henry Albrecht: The first funding came from my life savings of which I put in every dime. Next came friends, family, and mostly Seattle-based angel investors. In 2008 and 2009, we started to accumulate real customers. We started as a 30-person employer. Then, 100 on to 1,500. We charge a per-employee per-month fee for a couple of dollars. Even if you have a core team of five people working on this, we’re still moving a lot of money.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you put in of your own savings?

Henry Albrecht: $250,000.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise from friends and family? >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many of these 300 that you talked to converted into actual customers?

Brandon Levey: Maybe one or none. This was more than two years before building the initial product. I came back from Las Vegas completely dumbfounded that this is the way the world was working. I just needed to talk to more people to find out if this was just a one-time thing or if this is the way the world was. From my perspective, the answer was this is the way the world was.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company going? What were the next steps besides getting your friends to move out to San Francisco?

Brandon Levey: Getting Michelle to move out was big. In the fall of 2010, a former roommate of mine was finishing his MBA. I was talking to him about what he was doing after that. Eventually, he, I, and his wife agreed that he was going to leave his full time job and come on to Stitch to help with existing customers. He joined at the end of January, 2011. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You guys moved back to San Francisco at that point?

Brandon Levey: I was already living in the city. Michelle flew out here. She moved to Berkeley with my sister. One of my favorite stories from that year was, Michelle had no money. She would hop over the bar terminal because she didn’t have money to pay for the bar ticket. One Thanksgiving of 2010, she completely ran out of money and didn’t realize it was Thanksgiving. She went to go shopping but she had just $10 in her account. So she ate rice cakes and mustard. It’s a nice example of the hardships of early days of entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: When you went to that trade show, you saw that people were taking orders on pen and papers and reconciling with Excel spreadsheets. Talk to me about who these people were who you talked to get a sense of what that opportunity was. >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 3)

Christian Blume: What it allowed us to do was put different checkout processes. We didn’t care whether this was checkout processes built on our engine or something that we would compare against—somebody that was running on an in-house solution or an outsourced solution. We really compare how the conversion rates really evolve with the implementation of those different checkout processes. The good part about this was that our engine’s flexibility allowed us to generate much higher conversion rates. Most of the time, we came in there and we were able to bump up the bottom line revenue by, sometimes, up to 20%, which is huge.

Sramana Mitra: 20% bump-up in revenue is huge. If you don’t mind, I’m going to dig deeper. Let’s do a use case. Were you going after large e-commerce sites? What kind of sites were you going after?

Christian Blume: Our target market was never the small shareware publishers who were selling a couple of licenses on a monthly basis. We were going after those organizations who would be selling 100,000 licenses on a daily or weekly basis. It was experienced e-commerce companies. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You decided to work hard in grad school?

Brandon Levey: Yes. I finished my grad school with an exchange program. The University of Michigan, University of Friedberg in Germany, and University of Tokyo had an exchange. We were the first batch to actually do the physical exchange. I went to Germany for four months to do research there. I did a lot of research both in MEMS and circuits.

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

Brandon Levey: That brings us up to 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now that we’ve gone through the background analysis, position the product for me. Which customers are you going after? Specifically, what was the value proposition that you were going to deliver?

Christian Blume: We didn’t want to deliver a me-too product because there had been so many go’s at this already over the years. All of the companies that started out in this area, what they offered was a website that was password-secured. When you entered the password, you’d get into an administration site. You have the opportunity to update basic information. You can change the color, upload the logo, and create products. Some of those services offered limited promotion capabilities.

When we went in to the market in 2005, we figured that it was really time to change the approach of how we would like to tackle this market from a variety of different angles. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did things progress from there? What’s the next major milestone after this?

Joe LeCompte: We turned from website development into custom development jobs—not so much of web applications, but more of dealing with local companies and helping them solve business problems. We worked with Delta Airlines and Kimberly-Clarke.

Robert Castles: We found that the bigger the problems were, the better we were at delivering. We realized that was our opportunity to grow the company, differentiate ourselves, and have sustainability in a future market.

Sramana Mitra: But you were still working in this services mode?

Robert Castles: That’s correct. >>>

Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do with this company? You have built a profitable company growing at 80%. What do you want to do with it?

John Rauscher: We want to become public. We want to keep on building and growing. As we have been positive, becoming public may come sooner than we think. When we think that it will be time to accelerate and raise money through IPO, then it will be the time to go public. Being profitable year after year is critical.

Sramana Mitra: From an IPO scale point of view, you’re still too small. >>>