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Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When was this company founded?

Chuck Bloomquist: In 2002.

Sramana Mitra: When you started the company, what were the circumstances? Did you and your co-founder put a product together and start selling to customers? Were there customers first?

Chuck Bloomquist: We really didn’t have a product. We just had a concept. We had an idea for a better way to perform security for organizations. We sat down and started mapping out a business plan for what we thought would be the most appropriate way to work with organizations that have sensitive information. That led us down the path of getting involved in understanding the process side of any kind of a conceptual project. More so, how we could map that to the handling of information in its digital form. That’s where we got our foundation from. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 1)

How does a little company with most of its engineering in Denmark compete with Box and Dropbox? Read the story of Soonr.

Sramana Mitra: What is the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey? Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of the entrepreneurship story?

Steven Boye: I’m a US-Danish citizen. I was born in 1962 in Denmark. My mother is American. I always had strong ties with Europe and America. I graduated as an engineer in electronics. I started in entrepreneurship shortly after that.

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

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 1)

The Lean Startup methodology has created a frenzy to pivot. Entrepreneurs seek instant gratification, and when they don’t get it, they rush to pivot. The market is strewn with false negativities as a result, because entrepreneurs don’t have the patience to stay with a concept, develop it, and sell it.

ADARA is a counter-example that pivoted, but to an idea that took a lot of lengthy selling to gain ground.

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

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 1)

Chuck has bootstrapped a security company using services all the way up to $16 million in revenue and has recently raised private equity capital to develop a platform product.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What kind of background leads up to this story?

Chuck Bloomquist: I was born in El Paso, Texas. I spent most of my youth living in the Pacific Basin. After we moved out of Texas, we moved to Wake Island. Then, we went to Hawaii and lived there for a year or so. Then, we moved up to Alaska and the UK. I came back to Texas for college. I then migrated to Colorado.

Sramana Mitra: After college, you graduated to Colorado? >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What turn did the product take?

Brandon Levey: From a positioning standpoint, we had evolved to a real SMB solution. We would now position it much more as a multi-channel inventory order management solution for SMBs. The way that I like to think of the solution at the lowest layer is the management layer. It’s a small scale ERP for SMB. On top of that is an automation layer where we automate a lot of these business processes that are traditionally manual. On top of that, we started building out our intelligence layer.

Sramana Mitra: You were working with e-commerce merchants as well or just brick-and-mortar? Where was your sweet spot?

Brandon Levey: We’ve never just focused on one. That’s a very important part of what we do. What we like to say is we take a holistic approach to commerce. What that means is any way you can sell a physical good, we want to be a part of it. We want to be that underlying layer that makes >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does your work play in to the work of the SaaS providers like Aria? They are managing the online SaaS billing.

Christian Blume: They’re managing a broader spectrum in a much stronger niche market. What do I mean by that? They go into any type of service that could be a subscription, billable type of environment. Whether this is your utility bill or access to a cloud service such as a Box or a Dropbox, they can do all of that. What they actually offer is a very small subset of the solution that we actually have.

You are talking about an Aria system. They’re very specific and concrete around the subscription facilities and the engines that they offer around it. What they’re typically missing is any type of invoicing that’s associated with it. If you want to work with that kind of solution, you need to manage your own payment methods. You need to have your own fraud management and understand how international fraud has an impact on any type of solution that you have in place. You need to set up all of these different aspects to it in addition to the solution that they offer. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Specifically, what was that all about? What did you need to change in your style of operations?

Henry Albrecht: Since our product is about bringing culture to life and helping every employee improve, it has to be adopted at a pretty high level within the company to be successful. We needed the Chief Human Resources Officer, CEO, CFO, and others to be champions of the program. Are we hiring people who have the wherewithal and skills to get to that level? We have a Chief Operating Officer. That was a big step for us. We have a VP – Customer Success who came out of HR with 18 years’ experience. Those were just large executive, process, and technology investments. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It was a monthly recurring revenue though, right? It was a SaaS product?

Brandon Levey: Correct. It was the same model basically. In January of 2013, we hired Josh who used to consult small businesses. In March, we hired our first customer support rep who’s now a product manager at Stitch. That’s when things started to change. I like to joke that we accidentally started selling Stitch because Josh really liked talking to people. He’d say, “Maybe we should try calling our customers and helping them get set up.” When we did that, they would convert two or three times better. They stick around better. We started doing more and more of this. That just started showing a lot more initial traction. That’s when we actually started growing the company. >>>