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Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 1)

As you may know, we just launched a book called Billion Dollar Companies profiling the journeys of entrepreneurs building massive businesses. Edmunds.com may just be another unicorn.

Sramana Mitra: Where does your journey begin? Where are you from? Where were you raised and in what kind of circumstances?

Avi Steinlauf: Originally, I was born in London, England. For those folks from the UK or familiar with the UK, I’m a cockney by right given the fact that I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, even though the accent that you hear is nothing like an English accent. I really grew up here in Southern California and spent most of my schooling here in the United States. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that? What’s your algorithm for doing that?

Gaurav Rewari: Sometimes, it just comes from within. Sometimes, it’s through talking to people who’re willing to tell you things you don’t want to hear. For us, one of those was, “Make sure we crack this product market fit.” All too often, you have a situation where you fall in love with a product that you built and that you think people are going to need , but they don’t. Then it becomes execution.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not easy but it’s a little bit easier when you’re doing a B2B product or service. At this point, there is a tried and true process where you go talk to a hundred customers especially if you are a senior enough person. You can go sit down with a whole bunch of lead customers. You know how to listen to them and you know how to extract the nuggets out of that. You can pretty much validate an opportunity in the enterprise reasonably well. I’ve talked to many founders who have used that process and built very sizeable companies.
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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is at the heart of that? What do you think is the core competency that you’ve built in your product that is enabling you to branch out into upsell opportunities in the enterprise and even work yourself into additional use cases?

Praful Saklani: There’s a couple of things. First of all, I would say that there are a lot of tools out there in the enterprise right now. There’s a lot of data that’s out there. In terms of having accurate and reliable information, data integrity, in particular, is a lot scarcer than we think. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So far, what you’ve done is domain acquisitions. The three acquisitions you talked about are domain acquisitions. While they are high numbers for domains, relatively speaking, they are small numbers. You could also grow fast by acquiring a business, not just domains? Is that something that you would consider?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at currently. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have to deploy any kind of professional services to do that?

Gaurav Rewari: Just upfront for that period of three to five weeks. After that, the customer generally becomes self-sufficient unless there are some new modules that they want to start.

Sramana Mitra: Each deal is what? Several million dollars?

Gaurav Rewari: We can’t publicly disclose the pricing.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size are we talking about?
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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these angels? What was the logic of these angels being in this company?

Praful Saklani: Among the people that we brought on as early angels, one was the former CEO of SAP America. He’s actually listed on our website as an advisor. He was involved from a very early stage in the company. With his knowledge in enterprise software, he said, “This is a gap. I know that there’s a big need for this.” Through our networks and the network of the people that we brought on as angels, we have many people with CFO backgrounds and a couple of people with COO backgrounds. All of them have wrestled with this problem in their careers. That was really the criteria—finding people who were passionate about the business and leveraging our networks.

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised that I didn’t hear any lawyer in that group.
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Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Besides fun.com, have you done anything else in the last 18 months that is worth discussing?

Tom Fallenstein: We spend most of our time and money on our internal culture and infrastructure. We put in a million dollar automation system to help put out 35,000 orders in a single day. That’s where a lot of our money and time is going—making sure that we can fulfill all the customer orders that come through and that we have the fastest shipping and best customer experience. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: IT service desk, from a software point of view, it’s ServiceNow. Now you’re talking about agents. Isn’t that being done by these BPO service providers?

Gaurav Rewari: That’s a very good question. It’s still being put into ServiceNow. The need for analytics, I would argue, is even greater when you have outsourced part of that body of work to a BPO or some other MSP. Typically, what you do is you set out service level agreements but you want to understand how you’re doing against those service level agreements. These are not resources that you manage directly. >>>