Rollercoaster on a Bike: Zagster CEO Tim Ericson (Part 3)

Tim Ericson: We were working with Irvine branches of JLL and CBRE and rolling out much broadly through their portfolio versus looking at each individual property. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your go-to market strategy. It sounds like in the beginning it was people coming to you and it was a bit random. At what point in your evolution did you come up with a systematic go-to-market strategy and what was it? What segment did you go after? How did you go about selling?

Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: VisiQuate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What geography was that? Where were you based and where were you doing all of this?

Brian Robertson: I was based in Northern California. Most of my clients were from the West Coast. I was doing work for folks in Seattle, Oregon through Providence Health System.

Rollercoaster on a Bike: Zagster CEO Tim Ericson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the team? Who was the coder? You are not a coder, right?

Tim Ericson: I’m not a coder. We have a couple of friends from college who were coders working in regular companies. They were moonlighting it and they were doing it for equity. 

Sramana Mitra: How much did the University of Chicago pay you for this project?

Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: VisiQuate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 1)

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

Brian is a serial bootstrapper. In fact, he bootstraps using services. Terrific entrepreneur to learn from.

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

Rollercoaster on a Bike: Zagster CEO Tim Ericson (Part 1)

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

Tim has navigated major ups and downs during his years with Zagster.

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 a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The benefit you are offering is a flexible workforce of adjusters. They can pick people up as they need to as opposed to having everybody on the payroll. 

Matt Anderson: That’s a part of it. We can scale up and down. From a cost standpoint, it gives them flexibility. Here is an example that I use with my clients. When I was in Crawford & Company, at one point I was managing director for a service center in the state of Alabama.

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.