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Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 1)

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

We’re noticing a trend that I have written about in the past: SaaS-enabled BPO, also called Do It For Me (DIFM) technologies. The interview discusses the trend in some depth. Other stories on the subject include our case studies of AthenaHealth, Sabrix, and LatentView Analytics.

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

Anil Kaul: I was born and raised in India.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India?

Anil Kaul: I was born in Kashmir. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 1)

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

There are very few true technology product companies out of India that have made it to the global market. Varun Singh founded one of them, ScaleArc. The company is currently headquartered in Silicon Valley and is executing well. Some of the others are: Druva, InMobi, and Freshdesk.

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

Varun Singh: I’m from the north of India. I was raised in Chandigarh before I left and started working.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do all your schooling in Chandigarh?

Varun Singh: A majority of it. I travelled around a bit but pretty much, a few hundred miles of Chandigarh. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about how the product is architected. You talked about what other people cannot do. What is it that you do? How do you architect the product that you can do something different and better?

Josh Manion: That really started from the inception. When we looked at solving the problem, the solution that formed in my mind was that we needed to create a platform that was completely simple to implement. It needed to be as easy as saying to a customer, “Just put that one line of code on your page and our application is fully installed.” Once that was there, it would enable our customers to leverage our application to literally drag and drop any of these digital marketing vendors on to their site in a way that would be controllable by the marketer and no longer dependent on the external forces or things like waiting three months for the next release to your website.

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example. Let’s say this tag is in place on your website. What other application are they trying to tie-in to that process? >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the thought process behind your taking this one on and not growing the other one? Is this one a higher potential opportunity?

Andy Gotshalk: Yes, it has a higher potential. There’s a greater market for this technology. Another reason is that it is part of my desire and philosophy of where do I want to get at the end of the day. At the end of the day, I want to be delivering new technology to the field that’s going to help patients. I want to impact patient care. Blackrock Microsystems is still more of a pure technology company that’s bringing technology to researchers. They’re doing great research to better understand the brain. Blackrock Neuromed takes that next step and implements this technology into hospitals. We still have a long way to go.

Sramana Mitra: Who finances this company? >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)

Joe Speiser: We spend a lot of time looking at, “How can we engage the user? What kind of content can we show them to keep them interested?” What does that [time spent] look like? Is it one minute, two minutes, or three minutes? What’s that number? Right now, we’re up to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which we think is pretty great. Because of that, Facebook treats us well. They show our content more because the readers on Facebook enjoy it. It’s not just time on site. It’s also how many times is the post being shared, liked, or commented on.

Facebook also looks at the negatives. They follow and watch very closely how many times someone unfollows a post. If you hit a certain threshold there, Facebook will take action against your page – not manual, but automatic. They’re going to demote it in the news feed moving forward. That has negative points against your fan page. You accrue enough of those and your page gets buried. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was that insight?

Josh Manion: No matter what we did with those customers, the amount of value that they were able to realize was this tiny fraction of the potential value of all the different technologies that they would use. You could think of it this way. The vendors of this time told a wonderful story about the Holy Grail of marketing. Our technology will allow you to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. None of it actually worked or none of it was actually possible in the real world. That was because the enterprises that we worked with had no ability to take an action on their website, on their mobile app, or on the social media platform without going through this laborious process of working with their IT department to define the changes and get something out in a release. All of it was massively fragmented. >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 6)

Andy Gotshalk: We have good sales skills and we want to make sure we give constant pricing. But if there’s something that I can do to help make that researcher’s life easier, I do a lot of that on the front-end. I call it building collateral – doing things that, at the end of the day, the other person would feel that they owe you something. I do this personally and it parlays into business. I make sure that at the end of whatever activity we’re doing, I’ve done more than the other person so that if you were to look at it, someone would say, “I owe him.” That just pays benefits hugely down the road.

Sramana Mitra: You said earlier on in the conversation that you spun off some vertical businesses.

Andy Gotshalk: Yes. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of the content? What is the editorial strategy of Little Things?

Joe Speiser: The whole goal for Little Things – and what we’ve stuck with since the beginning – has been uplifting content – the opposite of what the nightly news represents. Our goal was to stop this constant flow of negativity. Everyday there’s a robbery, kidnapping, or murder but who wants to be constantly bombarded with that? Even though murder is down significantly in the US, the amount of reported news of it has gone up in the opposite direction. We’re now bombarded with more negativity than we ever had before, just because of the way the Internet is set up. Everything is at your fingertips and the notification just keeps coming through.

Every media outlet makes a lot of money off negativity. We thought we’d try something different with this and it’s been working. We’re literally putting out as much positive news as we can and people are actually interested in spreading good news. I think when you watch or read something that makes you feel good inside, you want to share that feeling with the people closest to you. >>>