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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the journey like in 2001 to 2007? It was slow as you are pointing out, but were you still getting customers? What was the sustaining strategy during that period?

Philippe d’Offay: At that time in healthcare, the consolidation hadn’t quite begun. There was this very strong entrepreneurial spirit in healthcare. We were going after the single doctors. That’s all we really could handle. At the same time though, I would say it was really lucky. We got a lead for a very large hospital system. That hospital system represented 500 different licenses. We got that business pretty early on.

We started seeing some growth because of that. The problem though is >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 1)

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

You know that we believe in the Bootstrapping Using Services methodology quite firmly. Here’s yet another story of how and why it works.

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?

Chris Taylor: I grew up in rural West Virginia. You won’t meet a lot of entrepreneurs out of West Virginia. When I was four, my father passed away, so my brother and I were raised by our mother. She did a fantastic job. My brother is also another entrepreneur. In college, I went to Carnegie-Mellon and studied Computer Science, Psychology, and Mathematics. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 1)

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

Ups and downs, successes and failures, experiments and pivots – the stuff that make up a serial entrepreneur’s journey.

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?

David Stubenvoll: I was born and raised in Levittown, New York. Levittown has the great distinction of being one of the first mass-produced communities. I’m the youngest of four. My brothers and sisters were quite a bit older than I was. My dad was a World War 2 veteran and bought his four-room house on the GI Bill. Since then, they’ve expanded that. I’ve lived there with my family and my grandmother until I went to college. I was the only one in my family to go to college.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go to college? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There a lot of people trying to do the solution that you’re describing – this central electronic health record of a patient. Can you help me understand when you started this company, what was the competitive landscape like, and how has that competitive landscape evolved over the years as you have been in this business?

Philippe d’Offay: When we started, we invented Card Capture. Unbeknown to us, there were other companies who were, at the same time, coming up with the same idea. We focused on mobility. That was the key aspect of what would make us different against our competitors. On day one, there were no competitors. It didn’t seem like anyone was trying to do what we thought was a pretty brilliant idea, which was to get doctors to use a mobile device to keep track of their patients.

The first thing I learned about medical software at PMD and as I was researching was that there’s this general rule in healthcare that healthcare technology >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 1998?

Philippe d’Offay: You have to go back a little bit because the two questions overlap with one another. There’s a lot of news lately about medical errors. According to a Johns Hopkins, more than a quarter million patients die due to medical errors a year. In 1991, my grandfather was one of those who died unnecessarily. In 2003, my mother was one of those who died unnecessarily.

In between those two was this awakening that I’m focusing my energy and career on consulting with business, and here you have this huge dysfunctional industry with innocent people dying. I was very drawn. I’ve avoided healthcare my whole life. All of a sudden, I realized why I couldn’t do that anymore. My mother was diagnozed with an awful brain tumour in 1998 about a week after I started my consulting firm. It was good timing because I didn’t have to >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 1)

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

Philippe has turned ~$300k of friends and family investment into a $6.5 million ARR business. Read on to learn how.

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?

Philippe d’Offay: I’m from the Seychelles Island. I was born in South Africa when my dad was going to veterinary school. My grandfather was the only private physician in Seychelles. My story goes way back to the conversations he had with my father about how medicine is changing and that it might not be a good thing for him to get into. He suggested that my dad become a veterinarian. >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the SaaS business.

Deal sizes are not going to be of scale. You’re selling software, so your average sales price is going to be a lot lower. The number of customers that you have to acquire is way larger, and people are not searching for freelance workforce management software. You have to find these customers somehow. How do you reconcile that?

Stephanie Leffler: The first thing is, from a price standpoint, I definitely recognize that a lot of SaaS platforms are relatively inexpensive. We have a slightly higher price point for our software because of the value that it does deliver. A customer who subscribes will be paying, at least, $100,000 for our entry-level >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork.

Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide a software that lets you manage them at scale.

Sramana Mitra: In this mode, what are the metrics of the business? How did the services business ramp up? How many customers and what kind of revenue? Once you switched a few months ago, what are the early metrics of the new format of the business?

Stephanie Leffler: We are so early with the new format that I don’t even have metrics that I can provide you. Our software went into beta two months ago. Our >>>