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Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There was nothing specific to the mortgage industry? It was pretty much a horizontal product that you apply to the mortgage industry and when you decided to diversify after the financial crisis, it translated reasonably easily into these other verticals?

Nick Hedges: Exactly right.

Sramana Mitra: You’re back to $4 million in revenue and you were still VP of Business Development at this point?

Nick Hedges: Correct. Actually another thing happened within the first nine months. The company hired a new CEO. The existing CEO Founder wanted to narrow his focus just on the product. The investors brought in a new CEO and that CEO moved some people around. For me what that meant was he asked me to not only run business development, but also the sales organization. That happened in October 2008 for me. That was actually a phenomenal opportunity >>>

Creating Breakthrough Innovations Through Design With Big and Small Data Analysis

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

For decades, Business Intelligence (BI) and, more recently, Big Data Analytics (BDA) has been successfully applied to create incremental innovations. These incremental innovations have been applied in such diverse areas as customer satisfaction, human resources, process management and merger & acquisitions. However, to date, the use of data has failed to provide new insights for breakthrough innovation. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of that partnership?

Jeremy Young: Windows95.com was owned by Steve Jenkins. He was my partner in Virtual Servers. He pushed traffic from Windows95 to my company. He basically had advertisements for the web hosting product on his website.

Sramana Mitra: How big did the company grow to be?

Jeremy Young: We were at about $11 million in sales at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all organic?

Jeremy Young: All organic. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Nick Hedges: I joined the company because I was really interested in the data that they were collecting and the flexibility of the platform that they had built. Essentially, they were collecting closed-loop data so these are data from the point that the lead was created to the point that they converted into customers, and every interaction that happened in between. I said, “That’s a fascinating and relatively unique dataset that we can use to really help sales teams be much more effective. In my interview, I said, “One thing that you should think about is if you mined your data, could you tell the sales team what would be the right number of calls to make and what the spacing of those calls were? If you can, then I suspect that you’re going to be able to help sales teams significantly increase their results.”

At that time, we had about five million leads with all of their outcomes. I thought there was a huge opportunity there that was relatively untapped. I also saw that the platform was flexible. They hadn’t made any hard decisions. There was nothing really specific about the mortgage industry that they had built into what >>>

Tailoring Design Methods to Incremental and Breakthrough Innovations

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

It is increasingly hard to find something genuinely novel that one actually needs or even wants. Most new products are just slight facelifts of last year’s version that we can all easily live without. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 2)

Jeremy Young: I was teaching HTML at the university at that time. There was a guy in my class, Steve Jenkins, who registered the domain name windows95.com before Microsoft was even thinking about the Internet. If you remember, Windows didn’t even have the web browser in their launch edition of Windows 95. He was building a website that was getting to be pretty popular. It was all free shareware and downloads. It was one of the pretty popular sites on the Internet.

He was in my HTML class just to get half a credit to get his MBA. We became really good friends. My idea was, “Why don’t I start a web hosting company?” I can talk to the current people that I buy web hosting from, get them to create a white-labelled reseller solution for me where customers would have no idea that they were actually purchasing from a different company. Then Steve could provide the marketing to push traffic from his windows95.com website over to my company. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 3)

Nick Hedges: The company was founded by Jeff Solomon who was running a software development company in Los Angeles. He had several clients who were in the mortgage industry, and they were asking him for a system that allowed them to be more efficient on how they manage the leads that they were purchasing from companies. He built three or four of these systems. He got together with an individual called Charles Chase who had just graduated from business school. He said, “There’s an opportunity here to build this as  a SaaS.”

In other words, you can configure it to your business needs but the core is fundamentally the same. They set out to do that. Before business school, Charles had worked at, what is now, Cornerstone OnDemand. He recruited another founder Tony Christopoulos who was the Chief Architect at Cornerstone OnDemand. He became the founding CTO of Leads360. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 1)

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

This is a wonderful story of a serial bootstrapper who has built a wonderful e-commerce business similar to Groupon, but with no outside money.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s got back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeremy Young: I was born in Spokane, Washington. My dad had ended up moving our family across the border to Idaho, which is about 45 minutes away. That’s where I grew up. I have six brothers and sisters—two older brothers and four younger sisters. I was raised in a middle lower class home. My dad worked the same job for 30 years. My oldest brother, Jeff, who is five years older than me ended up getting several jobs while he was in high school and got me interested in business and work in general. He’s a role model to me. He worked very hard and always had lots of money. He was able to buy cars, stereo equipments, and video games. I learned from him and really wanted to earn money as well. >>>