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Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Let’s go a bit granular here. You started in 2009 you said?

Robin Smith: I formed the LLC late 2009. It took about a year to recruit my first group of lookers. I built the platform and my website. It took about a year for me to do all that. It was myself and a software developer that worked on all of that for a year.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing all this in Oklahoma?

Robin Smith: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This year when you were doing all this groundwork, were you financing the project yourself? >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would the platform do? What was the idea?

Robin Smith: The idea behind it was really crowdsourcing. This was even before Uber. Even Dave Berkus calls us as the Uber of inspections. I had this idea to create a platform that would connect agents out in the field. I tried to think of who would be out there in the field, ready to go. I created the website, built the platform, recruited my lookers in the first year, and came out of beta at the end of 2010. Initially, my goal with the platform was to have customers place their order online.

If you wanted to look at a pinball machine on eBay that is in Kentucky and you’re in California, you can simply place a WeGoLook order and my looker in Kentucky would go out to that pinball machine, take pictures, record working demonstrations, and we would push it back to you in the form of an electronic report so that you would have current photos and all of the information to make a confident decision. That was what the platform was originally built for. >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 1)

How often do you hear of a successful entrepreneurship story out of Oklahoma? Well, meet Robin Smith.

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

Robin Smith: I was born in Oklahoma. I was raised, primarily, on a farm. There were about 12 kids in my class. I didn’t know much about the outside world other than what was there in town. I started my entrepreneurial journey in the second grade making yarn belts on the playground. I was able to talk a few of my friends into making them with me. We had quite the distributorship going with yarn belts until the Principal shut us down. When he asked us to stop making yarn belts, I started making Christmas tree ornaments to sell. He shut that down too.

Sramana Mitra: Why were they shutting these things down? What was wrong with that? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 7) 

Sramana Mitra: What, specifically, in terms of levers were you able to push by investing more aggressively? What could money buy you?

Venky Balasubramanian: This was around technology at that point because we were in a market where we had to move fast in terms of what we were going to be releasing. Things were changing fast in the market. We had to move our way into this market. Money helped us hire faster and build our team faster. If we didn’t have the money, we would have waited out a bit. We did have the money, so we invested.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, mostly the financial lever was in broadening the technology footprint. What about 2014? Was it still technology or was there something on the customer acquisition side that you were able to also do by using a financial lever?

Venky Balasubramanian: 2014 was an interesting year. One of the key highlights of 2014 was being profitable during the July timeframe. In late 2014, we put a lot of push in the marketing side of things. There was minimal focus on marketing from our side till that point. It was >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 6) 

Sramana Mitra: However, your per minute numbers are a premium over the carrier’s per minute numbers that you have to turn around and pay, right?

Venky Balasubramanian: Technically, yes but not really. In practice if you go to a carrier directly, what you do in effect is a service running more than 10,000 minutes. Our price points are much more lower than what you get from a carrier directly.

Sramana Mitra: So you have volume discount. Because people are riding on top of that volume discount, they get that discount. What you’re charging those customers is still a mark up over the price that you are getting from the carriers.

Venky Balasubramanian: Right. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 5) 

Sramana Mitra: If I were making that decision, I would have made a different decision. If I had $15,000 to $20,000 coming from two customers, I would not raise angel financing and part with equity at that point.

Venky Balasubramanian: I agree, which is why I’ll get to what we did a year later. A couple of things happened. It was also about timing. By the time we closed that round, we got the money from the customers. At that point, there was not much going on in terms of our customers. It also stems from the fact that, at that point, we were more focused on figuring out how we can go a little more aggressively. I agree with your view that raising money isn’t always the best.

At that point in time, we were pretty happy with the decision we made. Using that money, we hired a few more people within a month. We also applied to Y Combinator in 2012. What’s interesting is we had apply to YC in 2011 as well but was rejected. Like I said, I was fascinated with the startups that my >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 4) 

Sramana Mitra: Your business model was in providing consulting services, training, and support?

Venky Balasubramanian: Back then, we had no plan to monetize. This was still a project for us. We had no business model.

Sramana Mitra: You were based in Bangalore and Mike was based in France?

Venky Balasubramanian: Yes, I was in Bangalore back then. Mike was still in France.

Sramana Mitra: Where is Mike from originally?

Venky Balasubramanian: He’s from France. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 3) 

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t have comparable functionality with Twilio?

Venky Balasubramanian: We actually had better functionality back then in terms of what we launched and in the framework itself. We have a lot of incoming interest from customers of Twilio who liked what they saw. It was hard to believe for a lot of folks back then because it was just two people – Mike and I sitting out of our apartment and writing all this code. A lot of folks came in and said, “Whatever you claim on your website, does all of it work?” The code was all there on GitHub. The code was there right in front of them. We have a lot of consulting projects where they say, “I want to move out of Twilio and onto your framework.” This is around June of 2011. To be honest, we did not have a plan of starting Plivo as a business. It was a still an open source hobby project. We did get a lot of consulting offers from folks wanting to use our framework. >>>