Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 1)

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

Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business.

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

Roger Hale: I think I had quite a normal upbringing. I grew up in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. My mother came from >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did it impact the revenues? How long did it take for you to start producing really strong multipliers on your revenue numbers using the channel?

John Pope: It had an immediate impact. We were starting from nothing back then but we’ve built a third of our business through the indirect channel. We’re a company that’s nearing $100 million in revenue and about a third of that has come through our reseller channel.

Sramana Mitra: That’s one of the major strategic initiatives that produced. Were there other inflection points it

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Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s got into the block-by-block journey of how you got to $25 million. What were some of the first strategic moves that you made that set you up for that journey? Just walk me through the strategic process of navigating through to $25 million.

John Pope: The first one was a lesson that I’ve already covered here. You have to keep your expenses to a minimum. We all did that at that time. The second piece was to reinvest heavily into growth. If we had wanted to wait and continue to work on our product endlessly until we were satisfied with every last bell and whistle, we would not have survived. The strategy was to reinvest into sales and into lead generation. >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where there is something wrong is this crazy glamorization of unicorns and fundraising. That is really unhealthy and it is really destroying the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

John Pope: I completely agree. In closing on that, what I didn’t want to do was have a business and then stop working hard. Maybe this will resonate with you. A lot of people or so-called business advisors want to tell people to run your own business so that you can have all sorts of free time and have all sorts of money and be less industrious. I think it’s ridiculous that people do that. It’s almost like the get rich quick mentality. Don’t start a business so that you cannot work. Start a business because it’s who you are. >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Unless you go to an elite school or are plugged into an environment, you don’t really have access. With what we do, everybody has access anywhere in the world. Give us an anchor point from a chronology point of view.

John Pope: I started those two businesses in 2004 and 2006 right after I left school. The context was I had bootstrapped these two small businesses. I didn’t have any money to start out with. I was living in a very small apartment with my wife. We kept all personal expenses to a minimum. We made ends meet and no more than that. Everything else was reinvested back into the business. >>>

Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 1)

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

John and Jive have executed steadily over the last decade and have built a kick-ass company. Read on!

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

John Pope: That’s a good place to start because where we come from, how we’re raised, and the early environment really shapes the way that we look at things and determines what type of an entrepreneur we’re going to be. I am from the Tacoma, Washington area. My family moved around a bit. I was the oldest child. >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s my question. What was the monthly recurring revenue when you raised the money?

Mikita Mikado: When we raised $600,000, we were around $30,000 monthly recurring revenue.

Sramana Mitra: This was for the new product?

Mikita Mikado: It was for the old product, but I was selling a division of the new product.

Sramana Mitra: They thought that you would be able to switch the clients over to the new product. That was the thought process of the angels? >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the scope of what you’re talking about overlaps with all sorts of existing products like DocuSign or EcoSign. How do you position in this general ecosystem?

Mikita Mikado: I find that the space is quite similar to the CRM space. There were lead management products and sales compensation products. There were a lot of pieces till Salesforce emerged. What we’re looking to do is a commerce platform for businesses to transact deals.

Signatures is part of our product. It’s a really nice feature. People get a lot of value by using electronic signatures, but it’s not what >>>