Climbing Out of Despair Through Entrepreneurship: Ferren Rajput, CEO of Book A Jet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2010 when you launched the company. What did you launch with?

Ferren Rajput: When I came out, a friend of mine was looking at a car dealership. It was a Jeep dealership. He said, “You just do this until you get yourself back up on your feet.” I did that for a little while. I was able to talk to people at this private jet airport in Denver.

Climbing Out of Despair Through Entrepreneurship: Ferren Rajput, CEO of Book A Jet (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened next?

Ferren Rajput: This is late 90s. I started my first mortgage company in 1997. Money was starting to come in real good. I ended up getting married in 2001. My mortgage company really flourished.

As an entrepreneur, I was always pushing the envelope. I got into a position where I ended up with an IRS situation. It was about a million dollars’ worth of IRS debt from 2000 to 2002.

Bootstrapping by Services from Wisconsin: SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the money coming from? Which is the primary segment that is monetizing for you?

Anthony Minessale: People that are doing millions of minutes a day just by connecting their customers to their employees, and being able to maintain that. There has been a lot of growth on that.

Climbing Out of Despair Through Entrepreneurship: Ferren Rajput, CEO of Book A Jet (Part 1)

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

Ferren Rajput had hit rock bottom at one point of his life. This is his story of how he climbed out of that hole.

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?

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?