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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What data were you collecting and what was the process of collecting that data?

Rakesh Gupta: Any marketing activity in any company actually falls into three or four different kinds of marketing. One is, people using the phone to reach people. People are using email to reach people or people are doing door-to-door marketing. All people are sending physical direct mail. These are really the large portions of marketing that gets done in a local organization. Then, we added to it things like Google and Internet marketing.

Sramana Mitra: That’s just the parameters.

Rakesh Gupta: To answer your question, what’s important to an end user is a platform to slice and dice the data. But what do they need to slice and dice the data? What they need is the following. They need the kind of business a business is in. That’s very important to them. They need highly granular information on businesses. They need to know how many employees work at that business and what the annual sales is. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you were building more like a toolkit as opposed to a full blown architected product? You have a toolkit that you apply wherever similar problems crop up again. Does that describe the scenario better?

Carl Mazzanti: If you look at where we are 15 years from now, the primary verticals have changed. What problems we’re solving for customers today is different than it was 10 years ago but the email filtering company will most certainly run for a long time. But that is not the current growth story of the organization. That was the growth story for maybe our eighth year in business. In the technology space, your cheese moves around.

Sramana Mitra: I understand that at year five, you came up with this email filtering product. That was one of the major moves that you made in a product direction. It sounds like you’ve made more shifts in your strategy naturally because you’ve been in business for 15 years. At the five year point when you brought the email filtering product into market, what did that do to your business in terms of scaling? Did it double the business? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 1)

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

Tim has built an excellent company with quite unorthodox financial engineering decisions that have played out very well for him. Read this story to learn some out-of-the-box thinking.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Tim Hentschel: I was from the West Coast originally, from as far as Hawaii where my family owns some hotels and also a large tour operation company. I left Hawaii when I was 13 to move to Carmel, California where I went to high school. Then, I moved east to New York where I attended Cornell University for hospitality management.

Sramana Mitra: What time frame was that? What year did you finish college?

 Tim Hentschel: 2001. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you started this company. What did you do to get this off the ground?

Rakesh Gupta: The first thing was to figure out, with some level of clarity, what space are you going to go after. As our dear friend in Omaha, Warren Buffett, always says, “There has to be a level of clarity in your circle of confidence.” We had to figure out our circle of confidence that we can shine in. The first thing we had to do was define it clearly. That’s the first thing we did. That’s how the three things that I talked about came about. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Then what’s the next milestone after moving to that Microsoft strategy or becoming a more general plumbing support beyond security?

Carl Mazzanti: Shared services. Our first level shared services was email filtering. Instead of selling someone a hardware appliance, we moved that to what everyone now calls the cloud. Back then, it was called the shared service.

Sramana Mitra: Whose product were you supporting in that space?

Carl Mazzanti: It’s our own. We filter million plus messages a day.

Sramana Mitra: You actually went into starting your own product at this point?

Carl Mazzanti: We did.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. That’s a strategy that we see a lot of services companies use to move to products once they get into a market and develop a customer base. We call it Bootstrapping Using Services. >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Hats off to you that you were able to pull together this amount of angel capital because that’s a tough thing to do.

Lori Steele Contorer: It was a tough thing to do and as I said, I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. Now, we’re in a very good position.

Sramana Mitra: Right or wrong is only relevant if you have options. If you don’t have options, you do what you can do.

Lori Steele Contorer: Really good point. In hindsight, it’s genius. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company in the end?

Rakesh Gupta: That company became part of a large corporation. It’s still part of Reed Elsevier. They still have whole group called Reed Travel Group (RTG).

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Reed?

Rakesh Gupta: I was there for three years.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to the end of the decade, right? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was it about WatchGuard that made you choose them at that point?

Carl Mazzanti: WatchGuard had been around for 11 years at that point.

Sramana Mitra: They were already quite a while into the market?

Carl Mazzanti: They were established, yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s why you chose them. You thought you could build a process around them. >>>