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From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very nice story. What are you up to now?

Janine Popick: I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m a marketer but I am also into product management and technology to grow small businesses. Maybe, something along those lines in a consultative fashion. It’s been 14 years so I want to chill for a little bit.

Sramana Mitra: You need some rest.

Janine Popick: Unfortunately, my husband just started a new tech startup, which is probably going to take some of my time but all of his. >>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of companies do you recruit as channel partners?

Ambarish Gupta: These are like a tiny version of SIs in India. SMBs in India for their technical support requirements depend on large local companies who for example distribute laptops, computers, and computer accessories.

Sramana Mitra: How do you find them? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I see it.

Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing.

Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the key. That was almost a by-product of allowing people to upload their information. The big value was that these girls are excited that they’re on the Free People site. >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2007, you said you were at about $5 million in revenue?

Janine Popick: Around that time, yes.

Sramana Mitra: You have just raised that $1.2 million friends and family round. You haven’t raised any more money beyond that? Are you profitable at this point?

Janine Popick: Yes, we’re profitable at this point.

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was happening?
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Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the product you developed acceptable within the Indian regulatory system?

Ambarish Gupta: Yes. We solved the problem for India. Most of the emerging markets have the same regulations, which is VoIP is not allowed. We spent our first year developing the first PSTN cloud telephony platform in the world. That was a big breakthrough for us.

But we ran out of money. So, I went back to the US to some of my friends in New York who had made good money in hedge funds We were able to raise convertible-backed half a million dollars and used that to launch a hosted EPBX product in 2011. >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape when it came to keywords in AdWords. It sounds like that was a major channel and that did become very competitive.

Janine Popick: Brutal.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely, brutal is the word.

Janine Popick: You’re competing with people who can spend a lot more money. That’s what it comes down to. Any of these guys are getting $10,000 to $100,000 a month from their customers. We’re getting either free or $10 a month. It’s one of the reasons why Vertical Response decided to release a freemium product to let the freemium do the marketing for us. We launched that product a year and a half ago. We needed to compete. It was fine in 2005 to 2007. These days, the term email marketing is brutal. >>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you raise money from and what was the process of raising money?

Ambarish Gupta: Initially, I and my co-founder just put in 1-1.5 million rupees (~$20,000 -$30,000) to build the infrastructure. We had built up a small platform and were struggling to find some takers. We didn’t really want to raise money immediately. The Chief Minister of Orissa Naveen Patnaik was campaigning for elections. He wanted to be able to call 7 million people in 10 days. We were able to demonstrate our ability call 10,000 people in a day but the requirement was for 70,000 calls in a day. We were able to get the order from the political party but in the next 10 days we went from one server to ten servers.  >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s perfectly fine. Let’s double-click down on some of the strategic moves as you were building the company. You talked about your financing strategy. You kept raising money till about $1.3 million at the same valuation for almost a year and a half. What about customer acquisition? What about the team? What strategies did you follow in each of those categories?

Janine Popick: Customer acquisition came about in two ways. One was to go after each and every small business owner. That needed to be part of the way we offset our business development because business development deals can either work great or they don’t pay off at all. To start with, we were doing things like co-branding all our products so that anybody could say that they had an email marketing company. >>>