Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you start with? Were you bootstrapping the company?

Sunny Singh: Yes, I took about 18 to 20 credit cards. That was seed money for Edifecs. I had no concept of VCs. I was not business savvy. That was how Edifecs got started. I’ve never run a business before.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you go on in this solo entrepreneur working out of the apartment?

Sunny Singh: In about two years, we moved into our first office, which was an old motel-turned office by a stingy, frugal landlord who had sheep in the back. Interestingly, the first night we moved in there, there was no security. I was so scared. I slept in the office at night. We hired a team of about six or seven people who were doing sales and some development. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: $3 million was raised from whom?

Jason Wells: They are a private investment group out of New York. They’re not a traditional venture capital firm. They’re more of a Warren Buffet type of an organization, which makes about one or two investments a year in public companies. They didn’t have a portfolio for us. This was really individual money plus a little fund that they put together. They would always tell us, “We don’t really make these kinds of investments, but we like what you’re doing. We like you guys. We’re not going to give you a lot of advice because we really don’t know your space but we think you have a great concept.”

When we did our funding press release, they asked us not mention them. They said, “We do not have a website. We do not want people soliciting investments from us. We make these choices.” We’ve kept that private at their request.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after the $3 million raise and you have a hypothesis that you were going to be execute on? It sounds like that became the business. Tell me more of the milestones of what happened after that. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were the levers for scaling this? What strategy did you take to scale this business?

Jason Wells: Strategy number one was to change the business from a professional services business into a software business. There was some back-end technology and some software that was built to help them do these things, but the clients didn’t pay for any of that. They just paid a certain amount an hour for the services. The first piece was to create a software and a SaaS model. What’s interesting is you would take the client that would be paying more for the professional services and you would teach them to handle those human services on their own. They would have all the software to track their advertising and attribution and do the analytics on it. We built this prototype and essentially, used these existing customers as a test for this. >>>

Bootstrap the First Venture, Raise Money for the Second: cVidya CEO Alon Aginsky (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Other than the $400,000 that you got from the first investor, did you raise more money subsequently?

Alon Aginsky: No.

Sramana Mitra: You basically customer-financed the company, right?

Alon Aginsky: Yes, it was completely bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: So you finished college and then went to work for this company full-time.

Alon Aginsky: Yes. There was a good run in the US and also internationally. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Why did you raise money? What was the thinking behind raising money?

Manish Sood: The thinking behind raising money was that we had validated the opportunity and had substantial revenue was being generated, how do we accelerate? We are still dealing with enterprise customers. Some of these sales cycles can be long. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that the enterprise customers do not have any questions about the viability or the longevity of the organization. We are here for the longer term to work with them.

Sramana Mitra: If you have a balance sheet and P&L like that, you can always share that with enterprise customers. They would be fine with that. I don’t think that’s a reasonable justification. You wanted to raise money seems like a better justification. My point is it’s not to convince your customers that you’re huge. They’re not going to question your viability and longevity if you tell them you’re earning more than $5 million. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s your experience. We work with a very large number of entrepreneurs. Not everybody comes from a company where they’ve already seen a problem unsolved and then they go after that. You had a lot of your validation and probing done while you were already at Siperian and Informatica. You built upon that to go after a very similar customer base.

The process of finding the right solution is not always such a direct path for entrepreneurs. There’s more experimentation involved in a lot of cases than you have experienced because your path was more direct. The general methodology of bootstrapping using services worked for you and that’s something that we recommend heavily to entrepreneurs. Generally, it works the best for enterprise clients.

Let’s come back to where you got traction. Where was the initial traction coming from? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re trying to do that, are you then saying that you are going out into the social web to pull all that data? For instance, my private bank is Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley doesn’t have any of that information unless they go into my LinkedIn graph.

Manish Sood: Even before you go to the LinkedIn graph, there is a lot of information within the bank itself. For example, when you bank with Morgan Stanley, they have information on the different kinds of accounts that you have. You’ve already provided information about who’s the beneficiary on those accounts. If you have a trust, who’s the trustee? Who’s the lawyer on that trust? You have also probably provided your place of employment. There is public information available about who else works at that organization. If you start connecting those dots even without stepping into Facebook or LinkedIn type of social media sites, there is a lot of information that sits within these enterprise organizations, but it’s in different silos and different applications. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company?

Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say yes. It was a very original project.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing that out of North Carolina?

Frank Sheppard: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that project? You had a customer also that wanted you to build that solution for them, correct? >>>