Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you launch with? You talked about the two-sided marketplace. Did you have insurance companies already recruited who were going to hire out of your marketplace? How did you gather the critical mass of adjusters?

Matt Anderson: A lot of insurance adjustment firms were asking to find adjusters. I started with those firms by providing resources to them. That’s the first thing that we did.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012?

Saravana Kumar: I got 30 more customers in 2012. I was single handedly doing everything. I was a one-man team. I did the accounting, support, and the releasing of the product. I decided that I wanted to reach about 30 customers.

I’ve been based out of London ever since I moved. I converted my living room into a small office and I first hired someone to support me on the non-technical operations of the company. Being that small, it was difficult to convince anybody.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You took a two-step journey into entrepreneurship. You did something that was slightly lower risk. Somebody else gave you clients and profit-sharing but without equity. But you were preparing to go into the full entrepreneurship model. 

By the time you were ready to leave, did you have something worked out in your mind about the company that you were going to go full blast into?

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before you continue, talk to me about the first five customers while you were still at Fidelity. How did you find them? Who were they? What kind of deal sizes did you have? 

Saravana Kumar: Since 2004, I have been writing blogs – technology articles about BizTalk Server. I was always passionate about technology and I was writing a lot of deep articles about the study of technology. When I launched the product, I already had followers of over 15,000 readers at that time.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 1)

We’re big fans of bootstrapping, virtual companies, and domain knowledge. Matt’s story has all those ingredients.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

I love doing stories of entrepreneurs who are long-time readers of the 1Mby1M blog. Saravana is one. A wonderful story of how this entrepreneur is scaling a SaaS company from Coimbatore!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Building an Analytics Company to $10M+ in Revenue: Mode Analytics CEO Derek Steer (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases did you find the most success in? Were there dominant use cases? 

Derek Steer: Mode is a horizontal platform for analysis and so we are useful for whatever an analyst or data scientist wants to do with Mode. We get used for all kinds of stuff, for all kinds of companies of different sizes around the world.

Building an Analytics Company to $10M+ in Revenue: Mode Analytics CEO Derek Steer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Derek Steer: When you raise money from a venture firm, you show them an optimistic projection of the business and then you are expected to hit it.

I remember the key moments clearly but the day-to-day memory of May 2015 is lost. If I sum it up into what happens next, I would say financing is a natural place in which founders tend to reflect on what is happening in the business and the leadership teams. You had to step back and look at everything holistically during a fund raise.