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Bootstrapping with Angel Money: Josh Levy, CEO of BeenVerified (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007 when you started with this concept, did you raise money? Did you bootstrap? How did you get the business off the ground?

Josh Levy: We bootstrapped it for a couple of months. My co-founder and I were working out at his house in his living room. Right around the time when I left my last job in finance, I told my boss what I was doing. He actually wrote the first check for $200,000 to get us started. We moved to New York City and got an office in the New Yorker Hotel. Our first office was actually a hotel-turned-office space. We brought on a CTO as our first hire who is actually my CTO in my second startup.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you were planning to do this verification? >>>

Building Significant Revenue with Inbound Marketing from Israel: Pepperi CEO Ofer Yourvexel (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the pricing. How did you price this?

Ofer Yourvexel: It was trial and error it the beginning. We started with one price and we simply said, “We’ll look at how much ERPs cost.” We looked at prices of roducts like ours that were not cloud-based. We made the price significantly higher than theirs. We found out that people were willing to pay more if you show them that you have something different. We are still priced higher than most of the competitors.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me a benchmark of how much it could cost a company to buy your product?

Ofer Yourvexel: It’s modular. If you’re talking about a sales rep, it starts from $600 a year.

Sramana Mitra: For one user? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you pick a vertical to go after or were you doing it more horizontally at this point?

Manish Sood: We did narrow down on the life sciences vertical because we had seen some adoption from a SaaS perspective. But we were also approaching customers outside that vertical to understand where the potential opportunities might exist. During this whole process, we were still developing it as a horizontal technology because that was a part of the vision from the very beginning. Although from a go-to market point of view, we wanted to focus on just one vertical so that we could penetrate that vertical and get revenue out of it. >>>

Bootstrapping with Angel Money: Josh Levy, CEO of BeenVerified (Part 1)

Building businesses has become cheaper by several orders of magnitude. Josh Levy and his team took just over $2 million in angel financing, and has built a profitable business in New York. For those entrepreneurs facing the Series A crunch, this is an important story to follow. You will do fine if you have patient angels, and just use their investment to bootstrap to profitability.

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

Josh Levy: I was born in New Jersey. I went to high school in New Jersey. I went to the University of Maryland for college where I got an undergraduate degree in Finance. I also did a minor in entrepreneurship. I now live in Brooklyn. BeenVerified is headquartered in New York City. I’ve been on the East Coast my whole life. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re trying to do that, are you then saying that you are going out into the social web to pull all that data? For instance, my private bank is Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley doesn’t have any of that information unless they go into my LinkedIn graph.

Manish Sood: Even before you go to the LinkedIn graph, there is a lot of information within the bank itself. For example, when you bank with Morgan Stanley, they have information on the different kinds of accounts that you have. You’ve already provided information about who’s the beneficiary on those accounts. If you have a trust, who’s the trustee? Who’s the lawyer on that trust? You have also probably provided your place of employment. There is public information available about who else works at that organization. If you start connecting those dots even without stepping into Facebook or LinkedIn type of social media sites, there is a lot of information that sits within these enterprise organizations, but it’s in different silos and different applications. >>>

Building Significant Revenue with Inbound Marketing from Israel: Pepperi CEO Ofer Yourvexel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there also a visual merchandising element to the segments you were working with?

Ofer Yourvexel: Definitely. It’s not just about the product. The brand managers want to control the way their retailers are presenting it. There is an element of making sure that the retailers are complying with the way that they promised to present it and to track what the competitors are doing. You get it from the field. There’s a lot of merchandising features in the segment. They are not the typical features that you’ll find in traditional CRMs.

Sramana Mitra: Who were your first customers? You said people were downloading the app from the app store. How did they find out that such a product was there? Did you do any kind of marketing? How did you acquire these customers and who were the first adopters? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were the circumstances of founding this company? Who was involved besides yourself? What kind of financing did you do? Give me a bit more of the entrepreneur journey in the beginning.

Manish Sood: In the early part of 2011, myself and my co-founder sat down and talked about the idea. At that point in time, it was merely an idea in my head in terms of what we wanted to solve and provide as a solution to our customers. Doing it alone wasn’t a possibility. The first starting point was to look for like-minded people who would be able to invest their time and help us solve this kind of a problem from the ground up. That’s when I pulled in one of my earlier co-workers into the fold. One of the first things we started doing was reach out to potential customers.

Even before we created our product, the first step was to validate the opportunity and to look at if there would be customers who would be willing to pay for that. In fact, one of our first starting point wasn’t by going out and raising capital. It was by raising support from the partners and >>>

Building Significant Revenue with Inbound Marketing from Israel: Pepperi CEO Ofer Yourvexel (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about that pivot. What gave you the idea that this pivot is where the opportunity is? Was there any kind of validation that you were able to do? What was the catalyst for that pivot?

Ofer Yourvexel: The catalyst was the product that we had already done on the web that did not require the same level of effort. We saw that this is what’s attracting the customer. It was quite obvious. I must add that the sales process was much easier now. It’s easier to sell an application whose value is immediate to the sales people as opposed to applications where you need to satisfy the entire supply chain.

You want the consumer to use it. You want the store to agree to register the warranty. Then you have the people who were paying us. They were the only ones who would cooperate in that process. Now, we are selling to the people who are getting the benefit and we’re not dependent on third-party to provide the data. It was much easier. Just downloading an app from the app store and using it immediately. There were many indications that led me to believe that this will be a success. >>>