Featured Videos

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me understand the open source strategy a little bit better. You offer a portion of your technology as open source, right?

Mike Oeth: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a freemium open source model. You have other functionalities and features. It’s a classical commercial open source model.

Mike Oeth: Right. On top of that, we can provide a behind-the-scenes-service. You can use this software on your servers and it would work. You may need some consulting. At a certain point, if you want to scale this and get to a million users, you’re going to need a much more scalable platform. That’s where we would come in for the SIP.js. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting! What about financing? Did you, at any point, raise external financing?

Mike Oeth: We did not. We have stayed completely self-funded. We see ourselves as a software company and we’re lucky enough to have software margins. We’ve been cash flow positive since 6 to 12 months of starting. Rob does the marketing and the finance. He does an amazing job with our projections so know where we can expect our funds to be. We live within those means.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a bootstrapped company, basically?

Mike Oeth: Yes, we’re completely bootstrapped. >>>

Successfully Crowdfunding Design Driven Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Design-driven startups are ideal for attracting funding on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdfunder. However, competition for funds is fierce and only the top percentile receives significant funding. For example for Kickstarter “Design” projects only the top half percentile receive funding in excess of half a million and the average funding is $7,500. Thus, funding on Kickstarter follows the Power Law where the top percentile receives the bulk of the pledges and the funding then dwindles down to nothing. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This went live in 2004?

Mike Oeth: The company went live in 2004. The OnSIP Hosted PBX was October 2006. It was actually nice not being funded by VCs. We had the flexibility to change our business plan and go out and see what was working and what wasn’t. The SIP Trunking was working, but we were getting more and more requests for hosted PBX from people who wanted just to have a couple of phones out there and not have their own version of Asterisk. We spent about a year developing OnSIP-hosted PBX and then we launched that around 2006. That has been our flagship product ever since. At this point, we’re getting about 35 sign-ups per day and with the PSTN gateway, we get about one a week.

Sramana Mitra: 2006 was when the hosted PBX was launched?
>>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 2)

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

Mike Oeth: 2002.

Sramana Mitra: Where were you located? Still in Connecticut or had you moved out by now?

Mike Oeth: At that point, I had moved down to Yardley, Pennsylvania. RCN is based in Princeton, New Jersey; so for a while, I was commuting from Connecticut down to Princeton. Eventually, we left RCN and went with a small startup out of Livingston, New Jersey in 2002. That’s where I met Rob Wolpov. Rob has a degree from Columbia. He was handling the product development and there, I was handling customer service. Once Rob and I met, we launched a company that got bought by a company out of New York. Eventually, we got together with John and started Junction Networks in 2004. >>>

Bootstrapping in Pennsylvania: OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth (Part 1)

The theme of entrepreneurs building robust companies without outside capital continues in the story of OnSIP.

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

Mike Oeth: I was born in the MidWest, specifically in Speedway, Indiana. It’s the home of Indianapolis 500. I was very lucky in my early life to have three mentors who helped shape different parts of who I am. First, obviously, is my dad. He is a mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. He’s retired now but he had worked for General Motors. He was designing aircraft engines. He was very supportive when, in the seventh or eighth >>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given that it is such a high-touch customer service model, the question that I’m trying to ask you is. Right now you’re heavily venture-funded and you can finance your cost. At scale, does this company have the unit economics to become profitable?

Ambarish Gupta: Well, that’s true. The unit economics of this product is very good. It’s incoming calls and they are free in India. Our growth margins are quite high, probably around 70%. Then we spend money on acquiring customers, which in the first year was around 75% of our revenue. After a year and two or three months, we were able to break even. With a renewal, everything you make after the first year is profit. >>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background? What did he do after IIT?

Ambarish Gupta: Like most IIT guys, he went to Silicon Valley and worked for startups for eight to nine years. I got him back. He was also my colleague in McKinsey in the Pittsburgh office. He has a PhD in Highway Engineering from the University of Illinois. Then, he worked in McKinsey for four years. A lot of people in the product team working on this platform are people who have returned from the Valley. >>>