Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 1)

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

There are opportunities of building cloud businesses focused on mid-market customers, and many entrepreneurs are leveraging those to build compelling businesses. eSentire’s strategy is one worth looking at closely.

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?

J. Paul Haynes: I was born in Toronto. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto called Oakville. I grew up in a family of people studying >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I need you to step through the process of building this company. Let’s start by zeroing in on the concept that you and Ken agreed on, and how you came up with that concept.

Carl Ryden: We started with a general framework of building a business where it has primary value through its use. Inventory is evil and Ken learned that in the vacuum cleaner business. It was going to be a software business. It was going to be SaaS.

We wanted not just a SaaS company, but we wanted something that, through the use of the tool, would generate valuable data that could >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does the professional services group work? Do you have your own in-house voice people, or once you get the project, you figure it out and use the platform to recruit them?

David Ciccarelli: The latter. It’s the same platform and the same talent. The clients either don’t have the time or it’s the first time they’ve ever done this, or they might be a curriculum designer that has a hundred other moving parts. They need the extra support and bandwidth.

In the end, they’re looking for the same thing which is a professional quality recording delivered to them as an MP3. How they get >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to build?

Carl Ryden: I wanted to build software that helped manage configurations of home electronics. You can drag them on and it would tell you the best way to hook up your home stereo. It was called hookitupright.com. I built the application and put a lot of time and energy into it. We moved to Atlanta. I disassembled our things. I got a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and I can’t get this thing to work with remotes.

What I realized was it was terribly lonely – building something by yourself. I have a friend named Ken Garcia. I met him when I >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you do this transaction?

David Ciccarelli: That was 2007 as well. You can see these key moments in time. We figured out the two-sided marketplace. We’ve got revenue coming in from two sides. We took a leap of faith to be able to rebrand and relaunch the company. That was a huge step forward. Looking back, I agree that was the definitive moment. It did change the trajectory of the company.

If it was a reporter journalist doing research on the industry, they’re googling around. They look at three websites to see who sounds the authoritative source. Voices.com sounds like we’ve always been there. We’ve had a number of inbound inquiries >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 2)

Carl Ryden: We did the Thinkpad 350, 425, 701 and all of that. It was great fun. It was one of the best teams I had ever worked on. While I was there, IBM shutdown the PC company and moved it to Raleigh. They moved all the notebook development to Yamato Labs in Japan, and we were shifted to desktop PCs. About half of our team ended up leaving IBM.

My second-line manager had left and convinced me to join him at a six-person startup company. I was employee number six. We were >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Of the thousand, what was the split between buyers and sellers?

David Ciccarelli: Pretty close to 50/50. That has been our intention right from the get-go back from that partnership agreement. We knew that several marketplaces fail because they focus on one side of the business and neglect the other. We need to consider the needs and desires right down to features and communication plans. That’s been the split even today.

It’s a little bit more on the buy side because we’ve discovered that if the clients are coming, the talent will follow. The talent will >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 1)

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

Carl and his co-founders have bootstrapped Precision Lender to over $10M from North Carolina. It’s a superb story, including how the company has formulated an AI agent Andi.

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

Carl Ryden: I was born in North Carolina. I grew up in eastern North Carolina in a little town called Goldsboro. Folks don’t >>>