Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This whole phenomenon of having employees do intrapreneurship is a big trend that we’re looking at a lot. In our incubation program, we do a lot of corporate incubation. We have this Incubator-in-a-Box program that a bunch of corporations are using to layer their own incubation programs. We run, for example, a large program at Oracle where Oracle does this Oracle-1M/1M intrapreneurship challenge where employees are encourage to compete for 1M/1M scholarship. We’re very familiar of what you’re talking about. It’s a smart way to both keep employees motivated as well as fish for ideas that could become sizeable businesses.

Hamid Shojaee: Right, that’s exactly what the intent is.

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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about competition. This is very standard, right? Going from an on-premise to SaaS subscription model, businesses will always take a hit and then come back to a growth path. That’s very standard process. My next question is more a question on competitive landscape ecosystem. What is your positioning? What makes customers choose you over other competitors and who are those competitors?

Hamid Shojaee: Our biggest and most successful competitor has been Atlassian.

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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s step through the customer acquisition strategy. How did this $50,000 to $300,000 to $3 million happen? What was the customer acquisition strategy that was driving this growth?

Hamid Shojaee: While I was working at Microsoft, the way I treated it was that I don’t need this extra income. 100% of that extra income went into advertising. I experimented with Google AdWords as well as print ads. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2004?

Hamid Shojaee: First of all, that was a very interesting wakeup call in observing how Microsoft, as a company, operates and how competitive they are, and how laser-focused on competition they are. I got introduced to various different things with respect to talking points. Microsoft was very savvy in execution. I was quite awed by all of that. In a great company, I saw how they operated. They give a lot of power to their employees. I was quite impressed.

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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you were going in to raise the second round of financing, what were you able to achieve at that time?

Hamid Shojaee: We had created four different products around this fingerprint recognition device. One of them was for picking up your son or daughter at a day care center so that no one else can pick them up unless they had your fingerprint. We had a registration system where you had to register as a parent to pick up your kid. We had a clock in and out system for employers who had hourly employees. No one can clock in and out for other people. We also had a rudimentary system for controlling membership for a >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee (Part 1)

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Bootstrapping using a paycheck is a real trend. Here’s one more case study!

Sramana Mitra: Hamid, tell us a bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised and in what kind of background?

Hamid Shojaee: I was born and raised in Iran. I was 10 years old when we moved to the United States.

Sramana Mitra: What time frame was this?

Hamid Shojaee: I was born in 1973. I was there until about the end of 1983.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned that there’s also feedback going into engineering. Does that imply that you see bug reports on social media?

Howard Lau: It’s not so much bug reports. It’s something like product enhancement request.

Sramana Mitra: That’s for product management though, right?

Howard Lau: Yes, product management.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing a sentiment analysis. If it’s a negative sentiment analysis, you’re trying to take action against that?

Howard Lau: That’s a great insight. It is sentiment analysis. At the most basic level, you’re looking for things like positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Our engine allows us to dive in to another level of data. If what they’re looking to is negative sentiment, they can dive in to what is that negative sentiment due to. Is it due to coverage, pricing, or service level? It is in that fine level of detail that they can then respond to appropriately.

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