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Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did the first customers pay you to buy this software?

Neil Araujo: What mattered for us at that point was that somebody was using it. They did pay us. It took two years. The second customer was more painful because it took six months. The story over there is you have to be patient with these things. You have to persevere.

Sramana Mitra: You have to pursue. You have to be patient but you also have to survive, which is why how much people pay is really important. Otherwise, you could go out of business.

Neil Araujo: That’s why, at that stage, watching our expense structure is really important. You never know how long that will take. What you can control is the expense structure. Being an immigrant and not knowing any better, you’re naturally attuned to that. We got our second customer in New York. After that, >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about organic growth versus financing. Is all the growth that you’ve achieved so far organic?

Katherine Kostereva: It’s all organic. We never took loans and we never had investors. The approach is very simple. We reinvest everything we earn into our business. Nowadays, we have 700 people on board in six offices globally. You can roughly split those 700 people into two parts. One half is R&D and technical support. The other half is marketing and sales.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of this is in Ukraine?

Katherine Kostereva: R&D is almost 100% in Ukraine. We have several people in different locations to support our customers. It’s split for sales and marketing. For example, I work in our Boston office because I’m leading the expansion into the American market. We are heavily investing in our Australian >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2012?

Stephan Goss: We started hiring pretty extensively on the tech side. I think, by the end of 2012, we got up to about 12 people. The questions were just statically built. They weren’t optimized. There wasn’t anything about switching them around. We started hiring a lot of developers around that concept. We started building a platform that would basically power it all dynamically.

We built the full ad exchange to optimize which of the buyers were bidding on the inventory. That was the year in which we heavily invested in tech. We ended up getting up to about a $12 million run rate. We started to get a lot bigger and had to finance the hire of some more experienced people. Just having better technology ended up paying off significantly. >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you get this off the ground with some funding or bootstrapping? How did you get going and who were the first customers?

Neil Araujo: It was through a combination of primarily bootstrapping and some funding. It was very hard for us to raise money at that point in time, particularly in the Midwest. We spoke to a bunch of venture capitalists and none of them invested in technology in the Midwest. It was just too risky. A lot of them were in manufacturing, process engineering, and things of that nature.

When you take a combination of tech and legal, which is our primary vertical, it makes it even more difficult because legal is one of those markets where it’s not as big as finance or retail. It was hard for us to sell this idea that we can become a multi-billion dollar company. We are, primarily, self-funded. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When it came to a head-to-head with Microsoft, how did you win?

Katherine Kostereva: I win against Microsoft now in America as well. First, what is the differentiator. The differentiator of BPMOnline is that it is built on BPM platform. Even mid-size companies who value Business Process Management as the core of CRM application see this value. I would say that any strong company will value this engine below CRM functionality. They, obviously, prefer BPMOnline.

We provide the agility to our customers to change processes in CRM faster than any CRM solution. Why we’re winning deals from Microsoft and Salesforce today is because of our BPM engine. Let’s put it into two parts. To be successful, we need great technologies and need great sales and marketing. >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you utilize this data? What did you do with the data that you were accumulating?

Stephan Goss: We never did any bulk data sales. We would use the data to then start showing ads against that data. For example, if somebody told us he’s a diabetic, then we would show an advertisement about diabetes. We had a lot of inexpensive traffic that we were able to up value into high quality traffic.

Sramana Mitra: How do you show them ads based on email addresses? Do you do retargeting?

Stephan Goss: We would buy traffic. People would come to our website. They would answer questions and then right in line we show the advertisement.

Sramana Mitra: How did that ramp in 2011? >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 1)

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

Focusing precisely on designing a product strategy always helps scale. iManage has focused steadfastly on the legal process and the workflow thereof.

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?

Neil Araujo: I was born in Goa. It was a Portuguese colony in India. I was raised there and had a great time. I left Goa to do my undergraduate degree in a different part of India. For the first time, I was exposed to people from 26 states in India. I got my undergraduate in EE and moved to the US to get a Master’s in Computer Science.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your EE? >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We need to go from 2004 to 2015. In the context of what happened as you were growing within Europe, were you following the customer acquisition strategy using cold calling?

Katherine Kostereva: Yes, for outbound marketing and inbound marketing as well.

Sramana Mitra: Specifically, what marketing strategies worked for you that helped you generate the right leads? Is Russian language software a big deal for your customer base?

Katherine Kostereva: Our primary marketing channel was outbound campaigns. >>>