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Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It has a gigantic budget.

Gaurav Rewari: Right. Stepping along the pillars, if you will, of IT service management to IT asset management, to IT project management, these are the building blocks of something called ERP for IT. They were imagining that into existence in the cloud. I felt that not only were they doing that replacement category for IT service management, but their ambition is also playing out on a larger scale with this ERP for IT. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! It must have been very scary. How long did it take you to recover that $1 million from that domain?

Tom Fallenstein: It paid for itself in nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome.

Tom Fallenstein: We bought it in January. By the time we made it through October, about 30% to 40% of our sales came directly from that website became 30% to 40% of our sales. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: That brings us to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: That was pretty recently.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, but that startup bug I alluded to earlier hadn’t quite left me. It started biting me quite hard again. Our respective product lines at Oracle were doing really well. They were either number one or number two in each category. I looked out and I really felt like the enterprise landscape was changing on an epic scale right in front of my eyes. Specifically, what I felt very strongly about was the rise of the cloud delivery model. It was creating significant upheaval in a lot of established IT buying categories. We saw it play out in CRM with the rise of Salesforce.com and HCM with the rise of Workday. I began to ask myself, “What impact is this going to have on analytics?” Analytics has always been a secondary market. The idea is that if you can stroll into a company like we did in the mid 90s at MicroStrategy, you would see a lot of on-premise software. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Which brings us up to mid-2000?

Praful Saklani: That’s exactly right. In 2005, I decided it was time to move back to the US for a variety of reasons. I wanted to get back into enterprise software and started to think about the things that either I had experienced as a pain point or my customers had experienced that would be really interesting to create a company around. That’s when I started to zero in on my experience when I sold Yatra and had to deal with lots of paper work as well as the attorneys and accountants coming in and looking at files. I remember there was very little automation in that process during that time. I started to zero in on how well-understood all of that information is and started to network with other people who would have done some other things or who might be dealing with that problem on a regular basis. That was really the seed idea that eventually flowered into Pramata. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What next? What happened in 2006?

Tom Fallenstein: In 2006, we moved into a 10,000 sq. ft. facility and started the company. I hired my mom and two sisters to work full-time and started building out the websites.

Sramana Mitra: Were there other properties in 2006 or just those three?

Tom Fallenstein: No, we had more websites—superherocostumes.com, rennaisancecostumes.com and a few other exact match domains like that. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You can’t have everything. You have to choose. What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: In early 2000, I decided to do another startup in the consumer space. It was a company called FirstRain, named after the Indian monsoon season. I have memories of staring out at torrential rain and the relief it brought to arid lands. The idea was to try and harvest the web for information that may be useful for some vertical domains. It was a vertical search play. Of course, 2000 turned out to be a completely different time. This was the early part of 2000 with respect to technology markets. I started with some colleague from MicroStrategy and some professors from Princeton and Yale but very quickly realized that we needed to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves, which we did, as an enterprise focus play.

Sramana Mitra: I’m aware of that. We had Penny. She related that story on the repositioning.
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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where were you when you were doing this company?

Praful Saklani: I was back in Minnesota. We were based in the Twin Cities. Our customer base was all over the country and the world. The company that bought us was actually based out of Ireland.

Sramana Mitra: Before we go into the details of selling the company, how did you get the company off the ground? You were 25 years old and not very long out of school. What was the financing? How did you get this company going?

Praful Saklani: Much like yourself, I’ve always been a big fan of bootstrapping. That has always been the model that I followed in the businesses that I’ve been the founder in. We had a small consulting practice that had some very good clients in the Minnesota area. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You joined the costume business in 2004?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, I was the only one doing it full-time. It was only a seasonal business up until 2002 and then I built a website to see if I could make it a full-time job. I was doing extra orders basically through college out of my dorm room, which was just extra cash for going out. When I graduated, I wanted to do it full-time. In October, everything exploded.

Sramana Mitra: What happened that October? >>>