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Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So far, what you’ve done is domain acquisitions. The three acquisitions you talked about are domain acquisitions. While they are high numbers for domains, relatively speaking, they are small numbers. You could also grow fast by acquiring a business, not just domains? Is that something that you would consider?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at currently. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have to deploy any kind of professional services to do that?

Gaurav Rewari: Just upfront for that period of three to five weeks. After that, the customer generally becomes self-sufficient unless there are some new modules that they want to start.

Sramana Mitra: Each deal is what? Several million dollars?

Gaurav Rewari: We can’t publicly disclose the pricing.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size are we talking about?
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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these angels? What was the logic of these angels being in this company?

Praful Saklani: Among the people that we brought on as early angels, one was the former CEO of SAP America. He’s actually listed on our website as an advisor. He was involved from a very early stage in the company. With his knowledge in enterprise software, he said, “This is a gap. I know that there’s a big need for this.” Through our networks and the network of the people that we brought on as angels, we have many people with CFO backgrounds and a couple of people with COO backgrounds. All of them have wrestled with this problem in their careers. That was really the criteria—finding people who were passionate about the business and leveraging our networks.

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised that I didn’t hear any lawyer in that group.
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Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Besides fun.com, have you done anything else in the last 18 months that is worth discussing?

Tom Fallenstein: We spend most of our time and money on our internal culture and infrastructure. We put in a million dollar automation system to help put out 35,000 orders in a single day. That’s where a lot of our money and time is going—making sure that we can fulfill all the customer orders that come through and that we have the fastest shipping and best customer experience. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: IT service desk, from a software point of view, it’s ServiceNow. Now you’re talking about agents. Isn’t that being done by these BPO service providers?

Gaurav Rewari: That’s a very good question. It’s still being put into ServiceNow. The need for analytics, I would argue, is even greater when you have outsourced part of that body of work to a BPO or some other MSP. Typically, what you do is you set out service level agreements but you want to understand how you’re doing against those service level agreements. These are not resources that you manage directly. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the significant developments in 2008 and 2009? How is the company growing now?

Praful Saklani: This is where it gets interesting and fun. 2008 was a phenomenal year for us. We started to see traction with the use cases around understanding the risk inherent in your relationships and how you comply around those risks. I’ve been really talking to a lot of legal departments and finance groups who really need to get their arms around that. If you recall the mid-2000s, it was the post Sarbanes-Oxley era when everybody was concerned with those topics. That was very much in line the zeitgeist of the time.

Then in 2009, the whole world changed. The risk of today was a lot greater than any potential risk 10 years from now. The whole notion of what was important to a customer from an enterprise perspective started to evolve very rapidly. That was a challenge to us. We were seeing some good traction and growth and added some key customers during that time. Suddenly, we realized that the budgets around >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s 2010. What happens next? In 2011 to 2013, what are the next major moves?

Tom Fallenstein: An acquisition that I’ve been looking to try to get for the last five years just happened about 18 months ago. We acquired the domain name fun.com. That’s ultimately the domain I wanted to expand into every type of product. We’ve got a unique culture here. It’s fun. It’s like a small town Google. We’re all super nerdy and geeky. We love all the pop culture pieces. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what timeframe?

Praful Saklani: That brings us to probably mid to late 2007. There’s a second piece that I’d like to add to this. As we were developing this, it wasn’t just about a technology product model that we built. We actually built a whole service and delivery model around it. One of the things that we identified in our discussions with potential customers was that their issue was only partially a technological problem. Yes, they didn’t have tools that allowed them to get at this data. A lot of it was around data integrity and data accuracy. Where is the data coming from? >>>