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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was it a direct selling model? Were you selling directly to the hiring departments of these companies?

Mark Newman: Yes, that has always been the business model.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Mark Newman: At that point in time, we used to charge per interview. Four years ago after a lot of our hard costs were taken out of our cost model, we converted to a subscription model. Things like shipping webcams went away with the ubiquity of mobile phones. We were able to convert to a full subscription model.

Sramana Mitra: What’s in the product? On the surface, doing a webcam interview, you can do it on Skype. You can even do it on FaceTime. What’s special with HireVue? >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Vacasa Co-Founder Cliff Johnson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So far, what I’ve gathered is that you pretty much self-financed the business and grew organically. You started in Oregon within a range where you and Eric could service all of the work and gradually built out the service provider network to scale it. Can you talk about the ramp? How many properties were you managing in, say, 2010 to now? How did the inventory of properties evolve or grow?

Cliff Johnson: Right now, we manage approximately 2,300 homes. We started with one back in March of 2010. We’ve consistently grown at least two to four times every year. At the end of the first year, we were at a point where we had grown to have 56 properties. At that point, we knew we were viable. One of our goals when we started the company was to have 50 full-service properties. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing what kind of revenue level now?

Sunny Singh: In 2008, we were about $8 million to $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, you’re back in a healthy state. What’s the next major development?

Sunny Singh: In 2001, when all this was going on, we came across this mandate from the government called HIPAA where all healthcare transactions had to comply with HIPAA standards. We entered healthcare but we didn’t have any idea about it or how it works. We just focused on taking on one customer at a time and making them successful. Before you know it, after five to seven years of good traction, healthcare companies started loving us. We had new approaches to solving problems. We were very customer-centric and our products were really good. From 2006 onwards, from being an EDI tools company we went on to become a products company because we started doing production transactions. We pivoted again to healthcare by supporting HIPAA. Then, we pivoted again by selling more of providing services starting 2007 to 2008. We started building out that competency. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman (Part 1)

True to our 1M/1M mantra, Mark bootstrapped HireVue to $1M in revenue before raising the first funding. Today, the company has raised a total of $92 million, and is going $30 million in revenue. Excellent case study to study!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Mark Newman: I was born in Northern Canada, about 400 miles north of Toronto, in a small town called Timmons. I was a mining industry brat. My dad designed and built the copper smelters. He was a chemistry and metallurgy nut whose favorite thing was taking rocks and turning them into solid bars of something. Living up there, you were able to be blissfully unaware. You live in a small little town. You had chances to go to lakes and kick through trees.

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

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Vacasa Co-Founder Cliff Johnson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning. In maybe 2010, how did you get the business off the ground? Did you guys use your own funds? How did you launch the company?

Cliff Johnson: We started with funds that Eric had saved in order to launch the business. We started with a relatively modest amount of funds, to be honest. Eric was still working full-time when we launched the company. I took a couple of other jobs to start this company with Eric. We were both working other jobs at that time. Soon after we started, we saw the opportunity. We were generating revenue shortly after we launched the site in March 2010. We just focused on reinvesting the revenue we had back into growth. Also, we were taking excellent care of the homes that we were bringing on.

We were fortunate that we’re in an industry where there’s not a high cost of goods sold. The barrier to entry is really what kind of system you can set up to manage this. Initially, the biggest obstacle was getting people to believe that we were real. When we started, we launched the company with one property. It was in Long Beach. We started with the idea of being a distributed model. We’re based in Portland, Oregon but Portland didn’t allow vacation rentals. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: While it wasn’t a small company, it wasn’t one of the major companies – SAP or Oracle.

Sunny Singh: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: What were the contract sizes of the projects you were doing?

Sunny Singh: Under $2,000. They were all between $500 and $2,000. It depends how many seats they buy. If you bought more seats, you pay more.

Sramana Mitra: Early on, how did the revenue track? What was the revenue ramp like?

Sunny Singh: Around 1998 to 1999, we were a sub-$2 million company. We were doing a couple of projects. We were doing one contract where we were helping develop format for processes. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They should and they do, but from a software design point of view, you have to keep in mind that they’re two different departments. You can’t assume that the user and user interface are going to be exactly the same.

Jason Wells: We learned that over the next couple of years as we went to sell to a Marketing Director who was really sharp. They wanted a campaign management because they knew that when they were sending people from their Google AdWords campaign, somebody would click and then they’d pick up the phone and call. That data looks like a bounce to them because they went to an offline world. They weren’t getting the data attribution for the phone calls. They wanted to run campaigns but the sales group wanted to know what the conversion rate was. They wanted to know if there were any missed opportunities.

It’s the same call but they wanted to look at it differently. That starts bringing us up to over the next couple of years from 2012 to the launch of Convirza. We did a couple of things. One is we introduced speech recognition and turned it into a conversation analytics platform. We built that to listen to every single call. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Vacasa Co-Founder Cliff Johnson (Part 2)

Cliff Johnson: After law school, I ended up working at a tax firm in Colorado and gained a lot of experience there. I worked with a lot of small businesses and mid-sized businesses, which was very invigorating for me. I was interested in tax law but I was always more interested in their business story and figuring out where things were going well or what they were doing wrong. I next worked for a larger firm in Phoenix for about a year and a half working mergers and acquisitions, which I wasn’t very passionate about.

I moved back into a smaller firm in San Francisco doing tax law. I moved around a little bit after law school. I really dug into the companies and saw myself being more of an entrepreneur than being passionate about tax laws for the rest of my career. I was at a crossroads where essentially I was going to stay in law but was ready to start out on my own . >>>