From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You worked for a couple of more startups after this?

Jyoti Bansal: I came here because I wanted to start my own company. The challenge was that I was on an H1B visa. You’re not really allowed to quit your job and start your own company. I worked in a company for a couple of years and learned something and maybe start something of my own later. That’s the reason I came straight from school to Silicon Valley.

It took me almost seven or eight years. I worked in three different startups. My first one was this company that I described that was sold as an aqui-hire. The second startup was slightly more successful. It was also sold for $30 million. That company had a good start. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 1)

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

Jyoti started as a first-time entrepreneur trying to do a fat startup. Read how he managed to navigate the chicken and egg, and build a Unicorn-level success. Superb story!

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

Jyoti Bansal: I was born and raised in a small town in India. >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 5)

Ryan Fyfe: The biggest learning there was, if you’re going to scale to new channels, be mindful of how you view your metrics. For a long time, we blended all of our metrics. This sounds silly in hindsight, but it was very easy to cover up the problem when you look at blended average acquisition cost across inbound, outbound, organic, and paid.

It can be easy to cover up the inefficient channels where you should have cut them off a long time ago. We went through that for a period. That’s something that I and the business had to learn. We still do have some paid marketing. The evolution is less about channels though and more about how we optimize the current channel that we have. >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Take us through to the next round of financing. What were the milestones for that round?

Ryan Fyfe: The next round was a painful experience for me. The company was doing fantastic. We were probably at about $150,000 MRR. Customers loved us. Since I was flying in and out of San Francisco, I wasn’t really that much in tune with the corporate culture and what was going on on the ground.

I signed a term sheet with a tier one VC. I found out a lot of things that were going wrong within the company. I walked away from that >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did this European investor contact you?

Ryan Fyfe: Kristof had found some of our online reviews. I had a business partner who was really sales-driven. We had a disagreement where I thought things were heading online. I really focused just on organic marketing.

A big part of that back in the day, and even more so now, is if your customers love your product, they’re going to say nice things about you. We were getting a lot of early press that helped in some of the early SaaS review forums. He read some of those reviews. The story >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a particular segment of companies that you went after?

Ryan Fyfe: There was. I took a very online, digital marketing-first approach. From that perspective, these were early adopters or maybe businesses that were forward thinking in terms of moving their businesses to the cloud before that became a real thing. Beyond that, a common thread was around SMBs. I’d always work with small businesses. That was the segment that I knew.

The thought of enterprise back then was scary. I didn’t want to get on the phone and talk with people. From a vertical p erspective, we >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 1)

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

Humanity.com has operations in San Francisco, Pakistan, and Serbia. The founder lives in Panama. Yet another distributed software company that is scaling nicely.

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

Ryan Fyfe: I grew up in Canada. I moved around a lot as a child. Both my parents were educators. My mom is a primary school teacher. My dad is a mechanical engineering professor. Through that time, we lived in Belgium, across different parts of Canada, and >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: One thing about these large VCs is that a first-time entrepreneur with no background in a particular technology area has absolutely no chance of raising money from a large VC today for a fat startup.

Jedidiah Yueh: I managed to do it as an English major in 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very unusual scenario and it happened in 2000. I can guarantee you it’s not going to happen today. Part of it is because the market is full of experienced entrepreneurs and experienced technologists who are doing things. If you have no background, you’re going to be competing with that set. >>>