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Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: These are large enterprise deals essentially.

Beerud Sheth: Yes and no. They are large enterprises but selling to them is quite easy because we designed the product to be very simple. The app is a freemium product available in the app store and in the cloud. You just download and can get started in less than 30 seconds. It’s as easy as any messaging app. It’s freemium, so there’s no contract. People can pilot it and when they’re ready to scale it up, it’s a very simple self-serve payment model. It’s a pay-as-you-go model for $2 per user per month. What I mean is there is this huge trend of consumerization of the enterprise. We built our software to be really simple. In many of these cases, it usually just takes two to three meetings. Many organizations are just comfortable running it themselves. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have the ability to manufacture at a large scale with your design partner and did you have all the shipping and handling set up at that point?

Jodie Fox: Yes, we did have the setup for the shipping and handling of international orders. We didn’t necessarily have the correct manufacturing setup. We were fortunate that we didn’t drive those big sales straight away because we would have messed it up.

Sramana Mitra: How many audience did you get when you ran this campaign without the design site fully thought through? How did you tackle that?

Jodie Fox: I actually don’t have that number. We had 90,000 people enter the competition. Once we sent it, the Wall Street Journal piece went live. It got in front of the right people and it permanently tripled our business. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 5)

Manmeet Singh: Those four years were a struggle for me. Generally, entrepreneurs don’t last four or five years of struggle. There was no money and very little revenue. The VCs weren’t spending money and enterprise business was not looked upon as a good business. That’s the reason why I was out every week raising money.

Sramana Mitra: It’s amazing. The story that you told of being out raising money – $5 million worth of convertible note. I’ve never heard that before.

Manmeet Singh: I know nobody has done that before because I thought this was the norm when I was doing it. I didn’t get guidance. Now I do. At that point, I did not have that much exposure. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about this new product.

Beerud Sheth: We’ve been working on it for a year. It’s been in beta for a few months and we’re launching it right now. We’re very excited about it because I think it brings some very clever ideas to the table. Just stepping back, with the rise of smart phones, mobile messaging has become the number one use case—even more than voice. Between WhatsApp, LINE, and Kakao, they’re extremely popular. They work well for consumer use cases but not as well for business use cases. One big problem is that the group size is limited to about 100 people. If you have thousands of employees, you can’t use it. The other big problem is clutter. If you ask a question and 100 people reply, it’s impossible to make sense of it. There’s a lot of challenges with that. We figured a clever way to reduce the clutter and therefore support teams of unlimited size in addition to security, privacy, and administrative control that enterprises want. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 4)

Jodie Fox: Around five months later in March 2010, the next big thing we did was work with a YouTube blogger to promote Shoes of Prey. This idea of working with YouTube was not one that we’d heard of before. This YouTube blogger that we approached had a following that she had built around make-up videos. She had half a million viewers. She’d post videos three times a week and they would always get half a million views. It was a very engaged audience.

We approached her and she liked our product. We shot this video for 10 minutes. She talked about finding shoes with us. At the end of the video, it says it was a competition to design a pair of shoes and also make it stand out on www.shoehero.com. The shoe that had the best design would win. What we found was that before the video went live, we had 200,000 visitors. The day the video went live, we had half a million visitors to the site. We had 90,000 people enter the competition, >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 4)

Manmeet Singh: I stayed on my course. VCs were not ready to put in money. If you look at history, that was the worst time to raise money. That was the time that I had to go from one angel to another. I did coffee and lunch where I invited 10 to 20 people. Five of them showed up. Everybody wrote a check worth $35,000 to $50,000. Basically, this is how I got my first $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: How were you pricing the round? I imagine the $7 million was not in convertible debt.

Manmeet Singh: You’d be surprised. $5 million was in convertible debt.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! I’ve never heard this before. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Up till what point were you operationally involved?

Beerud Sheth: I was there until 2005, or about seven years in the company. In 2001, we started this enterprise software and we sold it in 2007. While the company was heavily focused on the enterprise side, I was a little less interested in that part. I was itching to start something else. That was when I moved on with Webaroo.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept behind Webaroo?

Beerud Sheth: Webaroo has been a mobile messaging company from the beginning. Around that time, which was pre-iPhone days, we ended up building up a text messaging platform. For a variety of reasons, we ended up focusing on Asia, India in particular. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Before you resigned, the site had already gone live?

Jodie Fox: That’s right. The website broke-even within the first two months. We still have savings that we were relying upon, but it meant that there was financial security in the company.

Sramana Mitra: When you say it broke-even in the first two months, what kind of revenue are we talking about? How many customers did you get in the first couple of months and how did you acquire those customers? >>>