Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The natural question that comes to my mind based on what you just said is, how do you price?

Christian Blume: Our business model is, we take a share of the transaction. If somebody wants to work with us, they only pay for actual performance. There are no upfront setup fees. Nobody has to invest anything in us. They can get a full-fledged solution in 30 different languages with all of the different payment methods and currencies. They’re ready to go and sell worldwide when they switch on our solution. We only gain something out of this relationship if they sell something through us. Unless they do that, we don’t earn anything.

Sramana Mitra: You get a cut of every transaction. Is that how you charge?

Christian Blume: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2005 to 2006. How did you finance the company to get to your first launch? >>>

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. >>>

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: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 1)

Yet another case study of a services company successfully bootstrapping a product, then raising Venture Capital!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of your entrepreneurial story?

Bill Moschella: I was born and raised in Connecticut. I attended college at Berklee and eventually got my degree. What I was passionate about all of my life was music. I went to music school and graduated with a music degree. I left college playing music in a band and opened up a recording studio. I never really had a job. I was always playing music. I was running bands. I found that I had a passion for the engineering side of music so I opened up a recording studio. I took all the money that I saved up from gigs. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 3)

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

Gaurav Rewari: That brings us to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: That was pretty recently.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, but that startup bug I alluded to earlier hadn’t quite left me. It started biting me quite hard again. Our respective product lines at Oracle were doing really well. They were either number one or number two in each category. I looked out and I really felt like the enterprise landscape was changing on an epic scale right in front of my eyes. Specifically, what I felt very strongly about was the rise of the cloud delivery model. It was creating significant upheaval in a lot of established IT buying categories. We saw it play out in CRM with the rise of Salesforce.com and HCM with the rise of Workday. I began to ask myself, “What impact is this going to have on analytics?” Analytics has always been a secondary market. The idea is that if you can stroll into a company like we did in the mid 90s at MicroStrategy, you would see a lot of on-premise software. >>>