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Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very common scenario in technologies trying to start their first ventures. They end up building technology, which essentially turns out to be a solution looking for a problem to solve. How did you maneuver out of that situation?

Michael Sikorsky: As you’re in that situation, you can feel it but you can’t connect. Whatever you have, people just don’t want, but they’re willing to keep talking to you because they somehow can sense the value. They can somehow sense that you have some expertise. Through that, all of a sudden, opportunities emerged where essentially, people who were working with us who were business owners were then giving me feedback like, “What you really need to do is say that this part of the framework is for e-commerce engines. This is how e-commerce engines can plug it in.” Another would say, “You need to take this piece and this piece and chop it out of the framework, and call that X.” I would say being phenomenally open and phenomenally coachable was important because I think of it as just swimming in the ecosystem. You start to hear which way to go.

Sramana Mitra: Who coached you through that transition? >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What specifically did you do as you started this company?

Michael Sikorsky: I got the best term for it from Michael Gerber. I actually had an entrepreneurial fever and had no clue what I had to do next. I just decided to do it. It’s not something I would recommend. I had only been working for about five and a half months. Through that lens, it wasn’t like I was used to working or anyone who’s dependent on me. If I reflect back, I started running experiments to try to figure out what people would buy. If I had known that I was running experiments and had thought about that more wisely, you could have been smarter and faster on how you ran the experiments. Some of the experiments weren’t conducted wisely and maybe ran longer than they needed to as you’re trying to hunt around.

Sramana Mitra: In those experiments, what did you learn?

Michael Sikorsky: For me, the biggest thing was that it takes a lot for the business to understand how technology can transform it, and there’s a lot of hesitation. Against the backdrop of the upcoming trend of the Internet, I was trying to build software to try to do different things in >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of company did you join?

Michael Sikorsky: It was a supervised control and data acquisition company. They sold software to pipeline companies that wanted to monitor what’s going on across all their pipelines. What is the pressure? What is going on? There is a visualization aspect, remote monitoring, and then there’s a hardware aspect. It actually had 10 to 12 names in the last 15 years because it constantly got rebought. At this time, I had some commercial shareware. I think they liked me because I was already a software person. After school, I’ve already sold shareware. I’ve done commercial software projects. That was my thing. I have always loved software. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 1)

The story of a serial entrepreneur from an off-center place, this time Alberta, Canada.

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

Michael Sikorsky: I was born in Alberta, which is in Canada in 1972. I’m almost 43. I ping ponged between two cities Remington and Calgary. My parents were half trying to be entrepreneurs and half trying to find work. My dad has a fireplace reseller company and my mom had a daycare. My dad actually lost most of the family’s money in the fireplace reseller business. That was an extreme lesson when I was younger. It was a little fuzzy. I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about all the real parts of the story as you get older. I got to see that growing up.

In my brain, I just fell in love with computers. I had worked at fast food restaurants and saved up enough money to buy my first computer. I think I was about 11 or 12 then. That was the thing that changed the course of my life. I totally fell in love with computers. I started >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 7)

Robin Smith: The corporate clients are amazed. A lot of them have to be in meetings over weeks and sometimes months just to have a project completed. They can do it with us, basically, overnight. Everything is geo-tagged. All the metadata includes time and date stamps. It’s all very secure. We’ve gone through our second security audit. All the data is deleted once it’s uploaded form our looker’s device. It’s exciting to have this mobile technology platform that works. We can instantly have it out in the hands of thousands of people.

Sramana Mitra: You said the initial part of the journey was all bootstrapped. Is the company entirely bootstrapped? Did you raise any financing? How are you managing to get to where you are now?

Robin Smith: We bootstrapped it until October 2014. A little over a year ago, I raised a Series A round for a total of $3.5 million. That’s what’s helped me fund the mobile portion. >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. How big is your company? How many people do you have?

Robin Smith: I have over 20,000 agents in our database nationwide. We only use around 65 to 6,800 of those on an ongoing basis, but we do have quite a few people interested in working for us. In my corporate office headquarters, I have 71 employees now.

Sramana Mitra: What do the 71 employees do? Functionally, how does that organization operate?

Robin Smith: We have a front end where customers, whether individuals or enterprise clients, are able to talk with their account representative. I have people that work directly with customers. Then I have a fulfillment team. Those are the people who are responsible for making sure that we have the looker who is weighted best for the task. Let’s say we receive an order for an auto inspection. The >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Robin Smith: We’re basically a mobile technology platform that provides data point retrieval for individuals and enterprise clients. We deliver that data however they need us to.

Sramana Mitra: How do you get paid?

Robin Smith: Our customer places an order and pays via credit card. Our enterprise clients get a bill every month and sometimes, twice a month. Our lookers typically receive 30% t0 50% of the total service fees. Of course, we have our overhead.

Sramana Mitra: How do you determine how much a job is worth? Is it a fixed price or is it a variable price? >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did these people find out about your service – that they could join as lookers?

Robin Smith: There are national property inspection companies and it wasn’t too far out of the realm of getting that same group of people. I didn’t want to launch with WeGoLook until I had the platform ready and I had the website the way I wanted it. We created a website and called it HouseLookers.net. We created this landing page. It was several pages but it was mostly landing page saying, “We want to sign you up.” Then I would go to different forums where there were real estate professionals or field inspectors. Those were the people we imported over into WeGoLook. Then I made an announcement to these contacts in my database saying, “HouseLookers.net is now WeGoLook. We are going to be looking at vehicles and heavy equipment.”

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2010. You have 4,500 lookers. What about actual looker jobs? How did you do there? >>>