Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the business was starting to become more of an enterprise business from there on.

Steve Liu: Very much so, yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did it scale? 2008 was when you made the transition to the new CEO. Between 2008 and 2014, what are the milestones and scaling strategies that you deployed?

Steve Liu: I think the big things that happened during that time were that we shored-up the product where the product just can’t meet expectations, and we put money and resources in making the product rock solid. Then, it was just building up and hiring. These days, we’re about 160 employees.

Sramana Mitra: All in Atlanta?

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you’ve read it, we’ve released a book called Bootstrapping Using Services where we deal with this topic extensively. We have companies that have gone up to $25 million in revenue using bootstrapping using services. This is a very viable strategy. However, you have to do it right.

Harman Singh: I agree with you. I wouldn’t do a lot of things I had done in those days. It survived only because of one reason—perseverance. There was nothing else that got us to this point.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. Frankly, I used to think a lot like you when I started out. That was a long time ago. I started my first company in 1994 while I was still a graduate student at MIT. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’m talking of an era which >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in your marketplace? Is the market penetrated at this point or is a lot of your customer base still on legacy systems?

Chris Sullens: There’s a lot of white space because of the new entrants and the capabilities of these small guys to now consume the technology. At the high-end, there is pretty high penetration where you have legacy solutions. The small companies have been doing things with white boards and spreadsheets and finding a good dispatcher who has it all in the head and leaning on that particular person to be their solution.

From that standpoint, there’s a lot of white space which is also the case from the field service side. More and more people are finding solutions for the market, but I would say that over half of our customers come to us with no system at all.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The angels invested on what thesis? Typically, investors look for investment thesis. What was the investment thesis?

Harman Singh: The thesis was that educators want to be connected to students over the Internet. That thesis never changed. The business model was unknown, but this thesis hasn’t changed. It wasn’t about B2B or B2C. This is all about whether educators can be connected to students online. We went on and the company Educomp invested some money into the business. The good thing was that we had users. Thousands of educators were using our product although for free. That was when we experimented by introducing a $50 a year membership. However, $50 per year is a very small amount.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 2)

Chris Sullens: From a solution standpoint, we have a proprietary route optimization algorithm that we have developed. It does two main things. One, from a longer range planning perspective, it can put the schedules in any given constraint. For example, a certain technician needs to do a specific job because of whatever constraints. We feed all that from an operating system into our algorithm. The algorithm then computes the most optimal way to organize that work to minimize downtime and maximize productivity for those set of assets.

What we see is upwards of 40% improvement in capacity. That has a big impact on businesses. If you can grow your company without having to go through the process of buying another vehicle or training another employee, it is definitely positive. It makes it quicker and a lot more efficient. That’s one side of it.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 3)

Sraman Mitra: In those four years, what kind of revenues were you pulling? How many people did you have? What was the scale of the business that you had built?

Harman Singh: We reached about a couple of million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have?

Harman Singh: We had about 50 people in India.

Sramana Mitra: So all your software development was in India all that time?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 1)

There are sectors of industry that have made their entry into the world of technology very recently. Often, these sectors leapfrogged all the prior architectures and have come straight onto the cloud. Partly, this is because of the cost structure of prior architectures that they could not afford. The cloud is bringing many such industries into the age of modern technology at a furious pace. Chris Sullens talks about one such corner of an old-fashioned industry that is now modernizing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you and Marathon Data Systems. What do you do? What’s the business?

Chris Sullens: I’m President and CEO of Marathon Data Systems. We’re a leading provider of cloud-based mobile workforce solutions for the field service and transportation industry. In the field service side, we have an end-to-end business management platform that spans everything >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 1)

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

Harman Singh has put up a heroic effort to build a global education SaaS company from Chandigarh, India. Now, many years since his journey began, the company has started finding its stride. As the cliché goes, it’s a marathon, not a sprint!

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

Harman Singh: I was born and raised in a small town in North India, which was known as the Manchester of India because of its small manufacturing businesses. My father was one of those small business owners manufacturing electrical goods during the  >>>