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Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, these are forcing functions that are in the hands of corporations or enterprises that if you were trying to do it directly with individuals, you wouldn’t have access to.

Henry Albrecht: Yes. Most importantly, work is where most people get the real meaning in their lives. Work is a core part of life. What you do in your work and what you decide to do should be very aligned with what you are about as a human being.

Sramana Mitra: It should be aligned with your values otherwise, you’re never happy.

Henry Albrecht: The best companies get this and they actually recruit and attract people who are fundamentally drawn to the core mission of their role or of the company. Companies that don’t get it tend to hire people who are there for a paycheck. The ultimate success of those companies depends on how more aligned they are on that culture. I had seen the way Intuit had done that and I was always blown away by that. I didn’t know that companies could be like that. I know I wanted to build something as intentional as Intuit. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You guys moved back to San Francisco at that point?

Brandon Levey: I was already living in the city. Michelle flew out here. She moved to Berkeley with my sister. One of my favorite stories from that year was, Michelle had no money. She would hop over the bar terminal because she didn’t have money to pay for the bar ticket. One Thanksgiving of 2010, she completely ran out of money and didn’t realize it was Thanksgiving. She went to go shopping but she had just $10 in her account. So she ate rice cakes and mustard. It’s a nice example of the hardships of early days of entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: When you went to that trade show, you saw that people were taking orders on pen and papers and reconciling with Excel spreadsheets. Talk to me about who these people were who you talked to get a sense of what that opportunity was. >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 3)

Christian Blume: What it allowed us to do was put different checkout processes. We didn’t care whether this was checkout processes built on our engine or something that we would compare against—somebody that was running on an in-house solution or an outsourced solution. We really compare how the conversion rates really evolve with the implementation of those different checkout processes. The good part about this was that our engine’s flexibility allowed us to generate much higher conversion rates. Most of the time, we came in there and we were able to bump up the bottom line revenue by, sometimes, up to 20%, which is huge.

Sramana Mitra: 20% bump-up in revenue is huge. If you don’t mind, I’m going to dig deeper. Let’s do a use case. Were you going after large e-commerce sites? What kind of sites were you going after?

Christian Blume: Our target market was never the small shareware publishers who were selling a couple of licenses on a monthly basis. We were going after those organizations who would be selling 100,000 licenses on a daily or weekly basis. It was experienced e-commerce companies. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Henry Albrecht: I quit my job at the end of 2005 and founded the company at the beginning of 2006.

Sramana Mitra: This is Limeade, yes?

Henry Albrecht: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You have a product management background. Walk me through the product management process that you came up with in turning this nebulous concept into a startup? >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You decided to work hard in grad school?

Brandon Levey: Yes. I finished my grad school with an exchange program. The University of Michigan, University of Friedberg in Germany, and University of Tokyo had an exchange. We were the first batch to actually do the physical exchange. I went to Germany for four months to do research there. I did a lot of research both in MEMS and circuits.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Brandon Levey: That brings us up to 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now that we’ve gone through the background analysis, position the product for me. Which customers are you going after? Specifically, what was the value proposition that you were going to deliver?

Christian Blume: We didn’t want to deliver a me-too product because there had been so many go’s at this already over the years. All of the companies that started out in this area, what they offered was a website that was password-secured. When you entered the password, you’d get into an administration site. You have the opportunity to update basic information. You can change the color, upload the logo, and create products. Some of those services offered limited promotion capabilities.

When we went in to the market in 2005, we figured that it was really time to change the approach of how we would like to tackle this market from a variety of different angles. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Henry Albrecht: So, I was quite jaded by the world of business. I wanted something with more meaning. Luckily, I was admitted to Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure I wanted an MBA or to be in business at all, but I don’t have the temperament or patience to be a novelist or any of the other things I thought I wanted to do when I was young. Mentally, I was well-equipped to be in business, but I wasn’t committed until I went to business school. I fell in love with marketing, technology, and human capital. I liked thinking about teams and people in business the same way I think about teams in sports. How do you get people all aligned and going in the same direction?

This was the dot-com era, so there was so much electric energy pouring into innovation and technology. To me, marketing was revolutionized by the Internet and applying a lot of interesting economic models to how new technologies were being adopted in the marketplace. I totally fell in love with it. I knew I had to work in Silicon Valley and at a great company that, not only has technology, but also has the power of a brand and team. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 1)

I am quite bullish on SaaS solutions for the SMB market. Here’s one that is doing well.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Brandon Levey: I was born and raised in Michigan. My family has a long history of entrepreneurship—from my great grandparents to my dad and his siblings. I started driving to work with my dad when I was five years old. He would pay me $5 a day to just sit with him on certain weekdays to visit clients. I started working in his sheet metal shop on Saturdays when I was nine. I wasn’t allowed to use all of the tools because I was only nine. I started working full-time for him over the summers between eighth grade and ninth grade. I worked as a commercial installer. Before I could drive, he would drop me off and pick me up at six at night. He made sure that others didn’t treat me like the boss’ son, which was nice. >>>