Featured Videos

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 1)

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

Ray had started Mavenlink with a certain vision, but had to pivot to find market traction. The pivot was handled skilfully. The original vision remains, and Ray hopes to be able to launch it in the next couple of years. Very good, deliberate execution.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where are you raised? What kind of background do you come from?

Ray Grainger: I was born and raised in Southern California. Though I’ve lived, traveled, and worked in many places around the globe, I’ve always called Southern California home. From an upbringing perspective, I’m from a middle-class environment. One of the key things that is fundamental is, I grew up in the 70s. In the 70s, divorce was a growing trend especially in California.

By the time I was 18, my mother and father had been divorced five times. I was moving from one house to another. What that really instilled in me as I became >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 1)

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

Mads started working on Sefaira while an MBA student at INSEAD Business School. He went on to launch a sustainable architectural design software product, raised $18 million in funding, and recently exited the company. Read on for more.

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?

Mads Jensen: I was born and raised in Denmark. I’m from a family with several generations of entrepreneurs. I grew up with business in my blood. I was fortunate enough that my grandfather, in the early 80s, thought this computer thing might have some potential. He bought me a computer when I was quite young. All kids these days grow up with computers.

Sramana Mitra: Where were you growing up? >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 7)

Robert Hoehn: Just to circle back to the competitive advantage, another one is data. Early on, we took the stance that we don’t want to charge volume-based pricing, which is against the grain for enterprise software. Most people are looking at it and saying, “Enterprise CIOs expect to pay per seat.” We’re afraid that customers will limit their audience and not try to build a crowd within the company because they might be saying, “I’m just going to do a small pile at first and pay for that. If that does well, I’ll roll it out to a larger audience.”

We really want to take out every hesitation for that, even for pricing. We want them to build the crowd as fast as possible, get as many people talking and interacting with each other, and get those numbers up as high as possible. We decided to go with a fixed model with unlimited community members. That’s one way that we’re different. The other cool thing is, we managed to build a huge dataset — a dataset of people, their behaviors and how they interact, voting on an idea, while moving an idea through various stages. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn in your international expansion? Was there any particular geography that was adopting your technology faster than others?

Robert Hoehn: On the marketing side, a lot of people shy away from it just because it’s hard work. It’s already hard to run a marketing campaign with SEO and demand generation. To do it in other languages is very difficult. We’re still learning but we’re definitely into it. We love it. On the product and engineering side, it’s like building a new market without having to build new, complicated products. I know how it needs to work. I just need to translate it.

Sramana Mitra: Is your product then localized in all these different languages at this point?

Robert Hoehn: Yes. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers were you able to gather as paying customers to get to this million dollar annual revenue?

Robert Hoehn: I think it was about 50 enterprise customers.

Sramana Mitra: How were you selling? Were you selling on the phone? How were you going to market?

Robert Hoehn: I did it all on the phone.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were in the company at this point?

Robert Hoehn: There were about eight or nine, I think. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the financial framework of this government relationship?

Robert Hoehn: Actially, we did most of it for free.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting by? How did you sustain the company?

Robert Hoehn: We put a small cash infusion in to start off. We quickly pivoted to try to sell to enterprise customers as well. It’s funny. There’s always training budget in government, right? We actually did a lot of training on how to run social media campaigns, how to do crowdsourcing, how to moderate the crowd. That was one of the ways we got by for the first six months. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make the next major strategic move and at what scale were you at that point?

Robert Hoehn: Around late 2008, we were getting a lot of requests for the idea of having a comment in a survey that could be displayed to other survey respondents and they  could vote on those comments. The idea of having a qualitative question turned into quantitative through votes. That was in the early days of Reddit.

People were voting on each other’s comments. We got the idea of taking it to the extreme. We’ll create communities within large enterprise organisations where people can give feedback. We pushed it even further and said, “This needs to be a separate company. Let’s split this off into its own thing and let it run.” >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale are we talking? How many customers were you able to get? What pricing model were you using? What are some of the business metrics at the point at which you quit the job?

Robert Hoehn: I apologize. It’s been a little while, so I don’t quite remember. The basic model was a freemium where people could create their own surveys and then send it out to 50 people or something like that. You could upgrade to a $15 a month package where you could have bigger lists. Then we had an SMB package that, at that time, was pretty cheap at $49. It was all credit card transactions.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you have? How many paying customers did you have?

Robert Hoehn: I think it was 50 at that time. >>>