Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many people are in Coimbatore right now? Is London still small?

Saravana Kumar: We have about 130. London is still small. We have about 10 people there. We only keep the top management here. One of the biggest things that we have done this year is invest in a 250-seat office that amounts to a $1.2 million office. 

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2020 when COVID hit? 

Matt Anderson: Up until 2020, I did a lot of sales. I had a part-time account manager that was doing some sales. We hired our first salesperson. I think it was 2019 when we hired a COO, which is a very big hire. He has been with us for a year.

I was able to offload the job to him because I was super involved with everything up until I hired a COO. That frees up my time to sell more. Our limitation became how quickly I can get onboard clients and how many people I can get to. I hired the first business development person in January of this year and we also hired a marketing leader.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were in the company in 2018? How many full-timers and contractors did you have?

Matt Anderson: I’m an avid user of Upwork. 

Sramana Mitra: So are we. We are big users of Upwork. I am very familiar with this model and we run One Million by One Million in the same model, so we are very familiar with the virtual company model. 

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 4)

Saravana Kumar: That is the good part about running a business in Coimbatore – the attrition is low. People are loyal and if you look after them well, there is no reason for them to go anywhere. 

Sramana Mitra: Yes, and they are probably close to their families. That’s a huge advantage.  

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.