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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you sell. Whom were you selling to? What was the sales decision making cycle?

Guy Mucklow: Our main target audiences were e-commerce businesses. Another really important learning and a key theme that underlines and underpins our whole business is about choosing your routes to market very carefully. Most of our competitors tend to congregate in certain channels and markets. We made a conscious decision to power our own furrow – to be a business that went against the grain. One of my first trade shows had around five or six of my competitors there.

Being the sixth or seventh conversation, it didn’t matter how well differentiated our technology was to everyone else’s. When you’re the sixth conversation in that chain, everyone is thinking exactly the same about you. Everything tends to merge into one. What we did was we chose a number of specific trade shows to >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was about to ask you about the commercial terms that you negotiated with the company that was giving you all this input about what to build. How did you structure the terms?

Christian Vanek: The terms were very simple. It was a gentleman’s agreement to be honest and we still are upholding it today. That organization could use SurveyGizmo for free forever, provided that they kept the “Powered by” byline. All of those other individuals that I was introduced to worked for organizations all across the United States, from very tiny market research firms to large publishing firms. These folks also had that same deal: Help me build the software and you get the software. They were so excited about the prospect that they were very involved in it and helped develop all of the initial features.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first paying customer for the service customer? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the focus? What drove the process of determining where you were going to focus?

Guy Mucklow: One of the things that we had done in trying to get PCA off the ground was to look at a piece of technology, which actually is very prevalent in the UK, around capturing data really quickly and simply. In the UK market, we have the benefit of an incredibly grand database, which is managed by the Royal Mail for the purposes of improving the efficiency of the postal delivery service. It’s got 29 million records in it. It contains pretty much every single address that exists in the UK. It’s updated very regularly.

Most people in the UK know their postcode. From a single postcode, you can get to a list of 20 to 30 addresses. One of which is likely to be yours. The Royal Mail had recognized that there was a market opportunity for them in being able to license this data to a technology community to enable them to build services around provisioning that data. The data itself, as provided by the Royal Mail, comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s actually a real nightmare to deal with. >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at this?

Christian Vanek: I stayed at it for two and a half years before I ran out of money.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2001?

Christian Vanek: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you burn the $200,000 on?

Guy Mucklow: Partly salaries and technology. Though we were building a lot of stuff ourselves, we needed infrastructure to support the service we were building. If you look back on those times, you think, “Why on earth did I do that?” We spent $50,000 on just building a business plan and using a third-party consultancy to build that business case and put a great presentation to enable us to go out.

Sramana Mitra: You learn. You don’t know what the priorities are. I’ve been through that. I know exactly what you are talking about.

Guy Mucklow: It’s about priorities. We just didn’t realize what the key priorities were for us. In hindsight, spending a quarter of your capital on a strategy plan was absolutely nuts. It’s one of those things. It seemed right at that time. Everyone was doing it. I don’t even remember the name of the company. It seemed to be the right thing to do at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the evolution of your career as a software programmer in this travel services company?

Christian Vanek: I worked on building the system for that conference company. Then the parent company asked me if I’d like to join them as an actual official developer. I was given more of a traditional developer title. I was very young and I was in a team of about eight people. They decided that it would be useful if they gave me to their marketing team. I was the developer sacrificed to marketing!

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 1)

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

Guy has bootstrapped his company to $20 million, and last Christmas, turned down a $100 million acquisition offer. Read how he has navigated his venture.

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?

Guy Mucklow: I set my company up over 16 years ago when I was in my late 30s.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning.

Guy Mucklow: I was born and brought up in the UK. I went to university in the UK. I am a university dropout. I lasted a year and lost interest. A lot of people >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 1)

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

Christian has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read more about the strategies that have worked for him.

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?

Christian Vanek: I’m from upstate New York originally. I was born in 1977. Honestly, I moved around quite a bit. I never went to the same high school for more than a couple of years. In the end, I ended up in Massachusetts. After high school, I had no idea what to do with my life. I was not the best student ever. The >>>