Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you name some of the locations that you specifically went after in this mode where there was enough technical talent that you were looking for but were also low cost?

Cedric Saverese: There wasn’t a particular location that I was aiming for. I was aiming for US, mostly from a timezone perspective. I wanted to be able to work with people in normal business hours. We did hire people in Europe. Usually it doesn’t work very well. Now we have people in Japan, Philippines, and India, but it’s because they’re working with customers that are in those timezones. Early on, I wanted people to be in my timezone to be able to work with them effectively.

Sramana Mitra: What parts of the United States were you hiring from? >>>

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When did you leave Sage?

Mitch Russo: 1998.

Sramana Mitra: Then you came back to Boston. What happens next? >>>

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to team. You started as a solo entrepreneur?

Cedric Saverese: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you carry on as a solo entrepreneur?

Cedric Saverese: Two to three years, while it was a side project. When I did it full-time, I hired the first person within the next few months.

Sramana Mitra: What was the position that you hired? >>>

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 5)

Mitch Russo: As I said, tech support was starting to run very long waits. A woman called and announced that she is the head of the legal technology division for the Los Angeles Bar Association. She was having terrible problems. She said our software crashed her computer and that we better get somebody out there right away. We only sell for $99. I think by that time, it was $199. To fly out and fix somebody’s computer wasn’t economical, but this was an important person.

I made a crazy decision to call another customer in Los Angeles and who I know was a fan of our software. >>>

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started, which competitors did you see most in deals?

Cedric Saverese: When I started, there was not a lot of competitive deals. We didn’t have a sales team. It was more like, “Here’s a product. If you want it, buy it.” We didn’t have a lot of visibility into our customers’ purchasing process. We didn’t know who else they were talking to. At that time, it’s not like there were a lot of other options. The competition was developers and people building it themselves.

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any money? >>>

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 4)

Mitch Russo: We started running classified ads in Legal Tech and other journals. We were tracking these very carefully. If we spend $50 on an ad and if we got six or seven orders, we knew that the ad was great. We just kept doing it every week. We knew what was working and what was not. It was nine months after the company had started.

In the first month of the company’s history, I went to a show called COMDEX. >>>

Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? You’ve got this hundred or so customers. You’ve got some validation. Were you ready to quit the job?

Cedric Savarese: Yes, we moved to a slightly bigger town but were still in the same area. I was hoping to find other people to help me grow the company. At this point, just by talking to existing customers and getting their input and feedback, I had seen some demand for Salesforce. I was vaguely aware of it, but it wasn’t as huge as it is today.

Salesforce, today, is probably the largest SaaS company in the world. I had some customers who talked to me about it. I looked >>>

Bootstrapping to Exit: TimeSlips CEO Mitch Russo (Part 3)

Mitch Russo: All of a sudden, my whole business was gone. There was no longer a reason to be in business. Neil and I sat down together and we brainstormed. Where else can we use this technology that we created? We came up with the idea that there are other people who bill by their time. Why don’t we adopt the system so we can help other people like lawyers bill by the hour and send bills to their clients. We went back to work.

It was another 90 days of changing the software, modifying the documentation, and reprinting much of it. It was then that we came out with TimeSlips. TimeSlips was the product that took us from 0 to $10 million. >>>