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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Other than universities, are there any other vertical trends that you see in terms of kinds of companies – retail, logistics, or healthcare? Where are you seeing the projects?

Alicia Asin: Because we are a horizontal platform, we have customers not only in universities but also in system integrators and communication companies.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. This is more of a trend question. What kinds of killer apps are you seeing? What segments are coming up with IoT killer apps than others.

Alicia Asin: The first one is Smart cities. It’s a dynamic segment in the IoT. It’s surprising that agriculture seems to be a mature market where we also have a lot of innovators willing to test technologies.
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you want to do with it though? What was the concept? What concept were you trying to execute on?

Trevor Traina: I had observed a number of things after 2008. I had observed that my friends and people I knew were less and less interested in buying more physical things and were directing their spend and time towards experiences — experiential living. What I realized was that while there are many wonderful marketplaces for physical things, there really was not a place where you could go and shop for experience. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to create the first true marketplace for experiences rather than things?”

Sramana Mitra: What would you categorize as an experience?
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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what else is strategic in your story of building this company. What other strategic moves have you made that are worth discussing in an interview like this?

Ricky Joshi: One thing I would say is we do nothing normal. Every single thing that we’ve done has been different. Our marketing has been more creative. I don’t mean branding. We’re just smarter about stuff. For example, if you type mattress, you’ll see a bunch of white beds. We put in branded shops with backgrounds that stand out. I’ll give you another example. This is pretty nuanced. The way AdWords works is you set a radius around an area. A lot of times you’re setting LA or New York. But our customer doesn’t necessarily live at the same zip codes. We actually went and took the average home value of a radius around every city and put a modifier on average home value to target zips as opposed to targeting city areas. We do stuff like that all the time.

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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Somehow, you managed to get through 2007 and 2008. At what point and what strategic moves did you make to get to a more sustainable path?

Alicia Asin: I think it was 2009. Through the maker shop, we were able to sustain the salaries of all the personnel. We were 10 people by 2009. We launched our official business line, which is the biggest one now and the one that is generating 70% of the revenues. I think that was the inflection point for us.

Sramana Mitra: When did you figure out that product – the product that today is generating 70% of the revenue? What was the process in figuring out the precise specs and product/market fit of that one? That’s the real business builder, right?
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It’s so hard to get that timing right, isn’t it?

Trevor Traina: It’s hard to get the timing perfect, but I find that if you really listen to your inner voice and talk to other people, you can pretty much figure out which spaces are important and growing and which spaces aren’t. I counsel friends and entrepreneurs who are looking to do new endeavors. I always say, “Let’s look at the space. Is this an area where there’s an opportunity?” I always tell people that if you pick the area of opportunity, you’ll have five times the result by working just as hard.

The other thing I learned is that one should always be honest about where their skills and desires lie. Being a CEO is a very specific skill set. Being a founder is a very specific skill set and it’s not for everyone. >>>

Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are these people in your payroll the people who are doing the delivery?

Ricky Joshi: It depends.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like a very expensive infrastructure. That’s what I’m struggling with. For a bootstrapped company, to roll out that kind of infrastructure is rather difficult. Help me reconcile.

Ricky Joshi: We’re doing $25 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Still, that full logistics infrastructure around the country is expensive.

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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that November 2006 time frame. You decided you were going to do an IoT platform. How did you get the company off the ground? Was it self-financed, bootstrapped, or did you raise money? How did you get going? What was the process of getting this started?

Alicia Asin: We had two very clear ideas. The first one was that we didn’t want to risk the money of our families or friends. We wanted to be in this alone. The second thing was that we didn’t want to be the typical R&D company that allows itself not to produce any revenues because it’s an R&D company. We focused on creating revenues and getting all the resources that we could. First of all, we applied for as many entrepreneur awards and grants that we could. By the second year, we had already raised $100,000 from different institutions just by winning awards. If you go to our website, you will see that we have 27 awards. My co-founder was the winner of the Innovator of the Year by MIT two years ago. That was one part.

Sramana Mitra: How much money were you able to gather by winning these awards?
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got everything. You did two companies after Compare..net One was SchemaLogic and the second was the one you sold to Intuit.

Trevor Traina: Yes, as of 2006.

Sramana Mitra: For both of them, you were Chairman, not CEO.

Trevor Traina: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Were these your ideas or were these ideas generated by people who came to you for funding? How did you connect with the entrepreneurs?
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