Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you have in terms of the content team? How do you run your content production farm?

John Sundberg: We have consultants and developers. We have product marketing managers. Those are all internal people that we have. We probably have a handful of customers that have done a couple of things too. They might create a piece or we will work with them to create the piece. Then we have an external marketing group that does, quite frankly, a fair amount. When I say a fair amount, what I mean is we’ve been working with them long enough for them to be a part of our company. Therefore, they know our company very well. They know our situation quite well. It’s pretty easy for them to create content that’s relevant, on-message, and accurate.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 3)

Jeff Lawson: What Uber has done is, take the communication part of calling a taxi and seamlessly integrate it into the whole experience. Communication used to be a standalone activity. Now communication just becomes part of the workflow that you have when you use Uber. We see this in many software companies. In the transportation space alone, you’ve got Uber and Lift. These are all customers of ours who are using communication to provide a great customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: This is a new category of applications. The call center is an old category. You’re replacing other players who have serviced the call center industry for a long time with a more modern architectural offering. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Unfortunately, that’s the problem with enterprise sales cycles. They are just so very long.

John Sundberg: Exactly. I did so many demos of the software to them. It was ridiculous. In one of the demos I did for them, they had people from all over the world call. I had given a 1-800 number. The phone bill alone that I had to pay was $3,000 for this demo. It was an interesting learning lesson for me. 1-800 numbers are not a good idea. If the company doesn’t have enough money to pay you to call, they don’t have enough money for software. I got rid of that 1-800 number six months after that.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a decision I made too.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Given that your primary positioning is that you are replacing hardware-based call center solution with a software and cloud-based call center solution, whom are you replacing in terms of vendors?

Jeff Lawson: It’s the typical hardware-centric companies like Cisco or Via. These are people who are trying to sell you a monolithic, typically hardware, but certainly on-premise stack.

Sramana Mitra: The primary functionality there is this call routing for call centers that needed hardware so far?

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go around that problem?

John Sundberg: We took the product and we broke it up into a whole bunch of smaller pieces. That big suite application had a survey application, scheduling application, workflow application, and form generation system. We broke them into smaller pieces so that we could then add in a complementary way. They had their existing pieces and it’s easier for us to sell a survey capability to add to their existing system. We effectively made a whole bunch of applications that were add-on in nature rather than core in nature.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 1)

Did you know that the core technology at the heart of apps like Uber and Lyft is a relatively lesser known cloud-based communication platform called Twilio? Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Twilio to begin with.

Jeff Lawson: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Twilio. Twilio is communication-as-a-service. What we do is we allow companies to use our communication infrastructure running in the cloud to build and innovate applications that they need to communicate. Customers span companies from the Fortune 500 to innovative startups like Airbnb and Uber. They use Twilio’s communication capabilities to fundamentally create a better customer experience that closes the loop in some kind of application that needs to talk to human beings. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If I got this right, you were drawn into this Remedy projects and as you were working on these, you saw the opportunity to build framework around the various Remedy problems that you were seeing and be able to productize what you were doing as projects essentially.

John Sundberg: I see it a little bit differently. I saw a business problem that people had and the common tool was Remedy. Therefore, I used the Remedy tool to solve these common business problems. You described it as Remedy problems. I describe them as business problems. Remedy was just the tool that usually got me invited to the party, so to speak.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around from your vantage point, what’s happening? What are the trends that you are picking up or trends that you’re anticipating right now?

Scott McIsaac: In today’s world, we see a lot of business being pushed in the direction of the cloud. Businesses are realizing that they can focus on what they do best versus having to deal with a lot of infrastructure. Again to Sean’s point earlier, if they have compliance needs, they’re still looking to the cloud, but they’re looking for a provider that can provide that level of service.

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