Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is that more? If you were to compare with Twilio, how do you compete? Where can you really make a differentiated value happen?

Anthony Minessale: Twilio is probably the first to admit that there doesn’t have to be competition to exist in this market. Head to head with Twilio, we definitely intentionally committed ourselves on taking a very low margin just to help the world understand the disparagement in the cost.

Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you finding the most traction right now?

Anthony Minessale: Something that’s really big right now is that the customer has learned how to use VoIP. The carrier industry is very specific. It mostly is the idea of high-density SIP traffic.

Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Gaming has been a very big advertiser base for mobile apps. I don’t see any reason why gaming would not be a good reason to go into.

Zain Jaffer: Investors were not very keen on gaming businesses. The idea was these games are not sustainable and was a hits-driven business. Our unit economics showed that when customers spend $10,000 with us, they’d make $30,000 back. We became a very important piece of the infrastructure. These games depended on our platform to gain users. 

Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you switched from that open-source based services company to a product company. That product company is SignalWire?

Anthony Minessale: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Did you build SignalWire entirely by bootstrapping with services or did you raise money?

Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to the $200,000 worth of pre-orders? Were you able to fulfill it?

Zain Jaffer: No. We knew that there was a demand, but we underestimated how long it would take to build the product out. We weren’t able to do anything with that. Customers were asking when this was going to be built. There was a lot of pressure.

Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a bit about how you built the company. You started in 2002. How did you get your first customers? How did you acquire them? Where did you focus? What was the positioning? 

Anthony Minessale: When we worked on the open source project, our primary focus was providing functionality to the missing piece. Open source is not a distinction in that early stages between end user and a customer.

Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened with Gokul?

Zain Jaffer: Gokul became a very pivotal figure. When we got into Angel Pad, a lot of people didn’t believe in our idea. It was very disheartening. There must have been at least 10 different advisors who came in and said, “This is never going to work.”

Gokul was the only one who sat down with us and encouraged us to keep on going. Gokul said, “If you’re passionate about this, you can do it.” That meant a lot because Gokul was the industry expert in advertising. His opinion meant more to us.

Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year is this happening?

Anthony Minessale: 2002.

Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape like? Were RingCentral and Grasshopper around?

Anthony Minessale: It was right before that. We were alone in the wild when we were doing this.