Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to do with WalkMe?

Rafael Sweary: The initial plan was to sell it as a platform for guidance on top of any website. This is how we started. We saw that we had a nice revenue. We were growing, but we weren’t growing fast enough. We launched the product in April 2012. Initially, it had a nice growth curve, but eventually flatlined. We were recruiting new customers but it wasn’t at the pace that we were hoping for. In July 2013, we decided to pivot our business and start charging more.

We were charging $19 a month for a plan and trying to get it to any website on the planet. We said, “Let’s focus on the serious >>>

Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the first business that you and your brother launched?

Bhavin Turakhia: The first one that we launched together was in late 1998.

Sramana Mitra: You said you and your brother did all your businesses together?

Bhavin Turakhia: Yes. In many ways, that was the genesis. Before that, we were independently doing a bunch of consulting and selling various services. Directi was the genesis. For a bulk of our career from that point till now, we’ve done pretty much everything together. By that, I mean we handle independent businesses and parts of various businesses but have co-invested together and built out this series of companies. >>>

Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get connected with family offices in the US?

Rafael Sweary: I met them while I was studying here in the US.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m asking you is that it’s an unusual way of financing companies. Family offices tend to not participate in early-stage companies. So, it was basically because of personal relationships.

Rafael Sweary: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You were selling through the resellers of the Microsoft product? >>>

Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 1)

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

Bhavin and his brother Divyank have bootstrapped Directi, a portfolio of Internet businesses over the last ~20 years. In 2014, they had their first $160 million exit. In 2016, they had a second $900 million exit. It’s a very interesting story of masterful business acumen and disciplined fundamentals-driven execution. Not a penny of external financing involved, by the way.

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?

Bhavin Turakhia: I was born and raised in Mumbai. My parents are originally from there. I went to school there. In many ways, the seeds for my entrepreneurship career were largely sown there. I remember in 1989, I was in the sixth grade when the school installed their very first computer room. I’m talking >>>

Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 1)

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

WalkMe’s vision is to make software understand humans, rather than the other way around. Rafael discusses the growth story of a company that is driving significant innovation in mobile and web user engagement.

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?

Rafael Sweary: I was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in Tel Aviv. I was an entrepreneur at a very early age. In elementary school, I >>>

Bootstrap First to $10 Million from Australia, Raise $25 Million Later from the US: Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you choose to raise your $25 million financing from? In Australia?

Ashik Ahmed: Funny story was that every morning, we’d wake up and there’d be an email from some VC. I wanted to focus on growing the business as opposed to getting interested in VCs. In mid-2006, we realized that our product has product-market fit. We have saturated the partnership model but we’re limited by how much our partners are getting. We need to grow the business.

The other thing was, even though we didn’t plan for it, something unreal happened. All of a sudden, we have enterprises with >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Arizona: Heidi Jannenga, Co-Founder of WebPT (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you fantasize about? Are you now trying to take the company public or do you want to do some sort of an acquisition? Now that you have private equity in there, you have to do exit.

Heidi Jannenga: Yes, we have to do exit, but that was one of the other things that we love about Battery. They are patient investors. They don’t have a playbook of three to five years. Their average is quite a bit higher than your average PE firm. We are thinking about opportunities for exit. We fantasize about being a hundred million dollar company by 2020.

We’re going to have 50% market share. We’re going to grow through acquisition. Inevitably, what we think is most likely going to happen as an exit for WebPT is one of two things. One, we are going to be the platform company in which Battery brings on, through acquisitions, other disciplines so that we become more >>>

Bootstrap First to $10 Million from Australia, Raise $25 Million Later from the US: Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When did you start the Gusto partnership?

Ashik Ahmed: That was between late 2013 and early 2014.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2014? How would you attribute that to Xero, Gusto, and your direct selling efforts?

Ashik Ahmed: The challenge with partnerships is that, at the start, you get a very good escalator. But then you reach an altitude where you can’t go any higher because you’ve have milked every customer from that partnership. At that stage, we were definitely >>>