From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You do need to talk to people. The validation that you do in companies like that is the conversations that you bring to the investors. They use that as the validation.

Jyoti Bansal: Exactly. That’s what I learned. I should have a lot of conversations with customers. It’s also a challenge. How do you find these customers? If your target market is large enterprise, how do you find 20 to 25 customers that you can show as validation? I started using LinkedIn where I reached out to people and connected to people and said, “Can we have a 20-minute conversation about this idea I’m working on?”

With their permission, I would take notes. In my investor pitches, I would share those notes to show the way the pain is and the >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground? Did you build something and then go out to raise money?

Jyoti Bansal: I was an engineer in my late 20s. I was convinced that there was a need there. First of all, the market was bigger than anyone thought. Then, the approach I was bringing in was the right kind of approach. I started coding it over weekends and nights.

Sramana Mitra: You kept your job at Computer Associates and you were doing the prototyping during nights and weekends?

Jyoti Bansal: Initially, for about three to four months. I started pitching my idea to VCs as well. Initially, a lot of VCs were >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You worked for a couple of more startups after this?

Jyoti Bansal: I came here because I wanted to start my own company. The challenge was that I was on an H1B visa. You’re not really allowed to quit your job and start your own company. I worked in a company for a couple of years and learned something and maybe start something of my own later. That’s the reason I came straight from school to Silicon Valley.

It took me almost seven or eight years. I worked in three different startups. My first one was this company that I described that was sold as an aqui-hire. The second startup was slightly more successful. It was also sold for $30 million. That company had a good start. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 1)

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

Jyoti started as a first-time entrepreneur trying to do a fat startup. Read how he managed to navigate the chicken and egg, and build a Unicorn-level success. Superb story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jyoti Bansal: I was born and raised in a small town in India. >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 5)

Ryan Fyfe: The biggest learning there was, if you’re going to scale to new channels, be mindful of how you view your metrics. For a long time, we blended all of our metrics. This sounds silly in hindsight, but it was very easy to cover up the problem when you look at blended average acquisition cost across inbound, outbound, organic, and paid.

It can be easy to cover up the inefficient channels where you should have cut them off a long time ago. We went through that for a period. That’s something that I and the business had to learn. We still do have some paid marketing. The evolution is less about channels though and more about how we optimize the current channel that we have. >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Take us through to the next round of financing. What were the milestones for that round?

Ryan Fyfe: The next round was a painful experience for me. The company was doing fantastic. We were probably at about $150,000 MRR. Customers loved us. Since I was flying in and out of San Francisco, I wasn’t really that much in tune with the corporate culture and what was going on on the ground.

I signed a term sheet with a tier one VC. I found out a lot of things that were going wrong within the company. I walked away from that >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did this European investor contact you?

Ryan Fyfe: Kristof had found some of our online reviews. I had a business partner who was really sales-driven. We had a disagreement where I thought things were heading online. I really focused just on organic marketing.

A big part of that back in the day, and even more so now, is if your customers love your product, they’re going to say nice things about you. We were getting a lot of early press that helped in some of the early SaaS review forums. He read some of those reviews. The story >>>

Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a particular segment of companies that you went after?

Ryan Fyfe: There was. I took a very online, digital marketing-first approach. From that perspective, these were early adopters or maybe businesses that were forward thinking in terms of moving their businesses to the cloud before that became a real thing. Beyond that, a common thread was around SMBs. I’d always work with small businesses. That was the segment that I knew.

The thought of enterprise back then was scary. I didn’t want to get on the phone and talk with people. From a vertical p erspective, we >>>