Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are the milestones of this business? By how much did it scale? How fast did it scale? What kind of strategy did you follow to make it grow?

Fred Hsu: What we wanted to do at first was to basically get a good sense of the market and establish a few key customers. We all had this internal confidence that if we got the customers, we know how to go out there and get the demand. We can build the full stack and do it better than anybody else out there. It started with a simple kernel. There wasn’t an intense capital need. Computing power was already ten times more powerful at a fraction of the cost than it was back in 2000 when I started doing startups. We didn’t need a lot of outside capital.

We also didn’t necessarily need a large sales force or support infrastructure just yet. We didn’t want to get too many customers to start off with. We really wanted to focus on making sure our systems work for a small set of deep pocket clients. The business lost $50,000 in 2011. But in 2012, it generated about $2 million in gross revenue. In 2013, $18 million. In 2014, we ended up with just under $80 million. >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you were out. What did you do next?

Fred Hsu: I moved out of LA. I married and had two kids. I raised them for a couple of years and got the entrepreneur itch again. Then in about 2010, I met up with an old college friend called Kai. He was in the Computer Science program in UCLA with me. He and I had actually met the day our parents dropped us off at the dorm. We were about 17 back then in 1996 and had been very close throughout the years. We decided we wanted to do some more projects together.

In 2010, we created a company called AppBank. The concept there was to capitalize on the social wave. We allowed end users to create their own apps on Facebook. It went from zero to single-digit millions in revenue pretty quickly. It was very profitable.

Sramana Mitra: Was it a platform company?
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Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 1)

Patrick has built an interesting company from Chicago that had to go through a significant pivot.

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 circumstances?

Patrick Kerpan: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My father was a policeman. My mother raised us. He was a Chicago area farm boy. His family was Croatian immigrants. My mom was a Brooklyn girl. He met her during the war. I was born and bred Oklahoman. I get caught on words like defense and cement, but other than that, I sound more Midwestern.

I studied at Northwestern University in the Chicago area. I worked mostly full-time through university in order to be able to pay for it. I was working as a janitor at the Northwestern Student Center. I once missed a mandatory janitorial staff meeting. Apparently, it was very important because I was fired for missing that meeting. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India.

Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually several generation of highly trained engineers who have worked at good companies building good products. There’s a lot of rich stuff if you can make them take risks.

Let me ask you a question, which is in the contemporary psyche. This whole notion of going to college. You didn’t go to college. You learned everything that you needed to learn in a very rich way. At the end of the day, you learned more by doing things hands-on than by studying theory. There’s no disagreement there. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP.

Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin who is our CEO right now. At that point in time, I had hired Justin as the COO. He did about six months of consulting with us before that. Before that, he was the VP Sales at Juniper.

Sramana Mitra: He hadn’t been a CEO before? >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You guys have already done six months prototype building with seven engineers?

Varun Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Nexus gave you money before that process started?

Varun Singh: Nexus gave us our seed round.

Sramana Mitra: How much?

Varun Singh: $750,000.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that take you? >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

We’re noticing a trend that I have written about in the past: SaaS-enabled BPO, also called Do It For Me (DIFM) technologies. The interview discusses the trend in some depth. Other stories on the subject include our case studies of AthenaHealth, Sabrix, and LatentView Analytics.

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

Anil Kaul: I was born and raised in India.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India?

Anil Kaul: I was born in Kashmir. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Internet marketing is your primary channel?

Rakesh Gupta: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of segments and where you found the most adoption, what segments are you seeing the maximum revenue from?

Rakesh Gupta: After that initial journey into financial services and insurance, what we are finding is that we have a very broad set of customers. Anybody who is a little savvy or who wants to be a little savvy about their sales and marketing is a potential customer for us. Now, we are not limited to any one or two verticals but we have a very broad base of customers. We are selling something that has a fairly wide application as I can’t imagine any business that doesn’t want to grow. We think around 5 million business owners will be a good prospect for us. That’s the market size we want to go after. >>>