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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: Aytekin Tank, CEO of Jotform (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study my free Bootstrapping course. 

Aytekin is a Turkish entrepreneur who has bootstrapped his company with a paycheck. He has used a freemium business model, and a virtual team strategy to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Aytekin Tank: I was born in Istanbul. I spent my childhood moving from city to city since my family worked for the government. Constantly having to adapt and make friends instilled in me an appreciation for different cultures and meeting new people. We have offices in San Francisco and in Turkey. We have remote workers in 20 countries.

Sramana Mitra: You spent your childhood in Turkey, then?
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Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The story that you described from 1995 to 2008 is not Perigen?

Emily Hamilton: Correct. Perigen acquired all of the assets of that company.

Sramana Mitra: Who’s Perigen?

Matthew Sappern: Perigen is actually the combination of a company called E&C Medical, which was based in Tel Aviv that was trying to do pretty much what Emily’s team is doing, but from a different place. It was all driven around intervening in difficult labors. E&C, in 2009, was owned by a few private equity firms who decided to invest in buying the assets of Emily’s company and combining them with the assets of E&C into one company, naming it Perigen.

Sramana Mitra: Did E&C have any customers? Was there revenue in the company?

Matthew Sappern: There was revenue, about the equivalent of what Emily’s company had. Significantly large healthcare systems were customers. >>>

Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many hospitals, for instance, were you able to sell your product to in that early phase right after getting the prototype?

Emily Hamilton: Almost all of the hospitals in Montreal. We have two medical schools here. I had colleagues in many of the hospitals who were former students or colleagues for many years. Montreal is a city of about three million and we have five or six hospitals. People were very interested in efficiency and high value healthcare delivery. It became quite evident that we needed to do more.

There’s a problem in labor, which is analyzing the baby’s heart rate because that’s what we use to estimate whether or not the baby is tolerating labor well. Many people have tried to develop fetal heart rate pattern recognition algorithms and they couldn’t. With this team, we were able to do that quite successfully. I’ll just jump ahead because I think it was the culmination of those two. The litigation settlements can be so astronomical. That began to attract the attention of US entities. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 6)

Ernie Bray: The challenge we found with virtual workforce was that some people just don’t fit well in that model because they get distracted too much. They don’t focus on what they’re doing. Because we’re a results-oriented company, we have our computer technology in our platform, we can monitor pretty much whether they’re getting the job done. We use Slack for communication. We use Skype a lot. We communicate through our technology platform itself. If you institute the right tools, you can create a pretty cohesive distributed workforce, but it really goes back to having the right people who can do that.

Sramana Mitra: It takes a lot of self-discipline. Do you have a lot of people working from home? You said you have 12 people working at headquarters. Do you have a second office?

Ernie Bray: No. We have to have accounting. Accounting is in the headquarters. We have quality assurance in the headquarters and some administrative staff.

Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to build this company in an organic way. Talk to me a bit about that decision.
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Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you talk about timing, what year are we talking about?

Emily Hamilton: Back in mid-1990s.

Sramana Mitra: So you got a bunch of grants to get this thing off the ground.

Emily Hamilton: It wasn’t exactly a grant in the traditional sense. This was money which was intended to foster research, which would have commercial potential. If, at the end of the research period, it appeared to have commercial potential, the university would help secure venture capital or financing to help to bring it to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: When you started in 1995, how much capital were you able to access in this mode?

Emily Hamilton: The first funding was about $2 million. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, you were at about $1.2 million in revenue. In 2009, you were already on Inc. 5000. What was the revenue ramp?

Ernie Bray: In 2009, we went to $8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Ernie Bray: We’re pushing towards $15 million. We also made Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. We made that four years in a row.

Sramana Mitra: I’m more interested in the mechanics of how you did all this. In that period of 2009 to 2015, what are some of the other strategic moves and inflection points in the business?

Ernie Bray: The biggest challenge for our business was transitioning from a cohesive small team of maybe seven to eight employees to finally making that step to becoming more corporate and actually having to institute more policies and procedures. When you’re a small company, >>>

Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 1)

Perigen is an amalgamation of a couple of different companies. This story relates how the entrepreneurs navigated a long journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by telling us a little bit about your personal background. I’d like to do that with both of you since you are co-founders.

Matthew Sappern: Just for clarity’s sake, Emily developed this technology. I was brought in by the Board a number of years ago to essentially restart this company.

Sramana Mitra: I see. Emily is the founder.

Matthew Sappern: One of the initial founders, and the developer of the core technology. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Essentially, the $400,000 in the first year was from about 8 to 10 deals?

Ernie Bray: Yes. We had about 8 to 10 clients.

Sramana Mitra: These were clients that would remain as recurring revenue clients, because they would continue to use your system and the pricing model is based on number of claims processed.

Ernie Bray: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start again?

Ernie Bray: 2004 was our first full year of business. >>>