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Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 4)

Sramana: During the nine-month bootstrapping phase, how many people were focused on the services business and how many people were focused on product development? I’m also curious about how your business breaks down between Croatia and London.

Alex Fuller: The business breaks down 50/50 between London and Croatia. We also bring consultants from Croatia onsite with UK customers because the distance is not prohibitive. During the first year, we had 25 people. Most of them were focused on projects with clients. We had about eight people doing R&D development during that time.

Sramana: What costs did you have to cover during those nine months with the services revenue?

Alex Fuller: The principal cost was people. >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you said you were charging subscriptions. Was anyone paying for subscription?

David Barrett: That’s interesting as well. At that time, we weren’t charging. In fact, we didn’t intend to charge for a long time. We raised our million dollars, did our pivot and were doing expense reports. This business was going to be so easy. It’s a classic enterprise play. We raise a lot of money and spend it on ads. Those ads were going to power a marketing theme that gets leads to the sales team. However, we soon learned that it just didn’t work that way. We did a whole lot of things, but we just couldn’t get customers. This is when the second really important thing happened.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 3)

John Miller: One of the challenges they have coming back into education is the whole on boarding process and preparing the employee to come back in. There’re a number of demands that really come into play here. When you start to think about regaining your study skills and the ability to do time management with the demands of, potentially, a family and certainly full-time employment, it becomes challenging. Our program, working with education, enables their on boarding process to educate and help these people coming back into education from the workforce, so they can continue to grow into these new roles on a career path. >>>

Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you go about building your team in Croatia?

Alex Fuller: We flew out there and did some relatively simple job advertising. We set up an assessment center where we invited people to come and spend a couple of days with us. We put them through a training course because the Force.com platform was a new technology. It was not a well-known platform at the time, so we knew that we would not find experts in Force.com development. Our strategy was to acquire talent with the right technical skills, experience, and understanding. Once we knew they had the skill sets we needed, then it was just a matter of training them to understand the Force.com platform. >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you gain traction with?

David Barrett: We did a couple of things. Most of the important things we did were, frankly, just by accident. I would say that the genius of Expensify is not that we have some great insight into the market, rather we knew we didn’t know anything. It’s fine to not know anything, so long as you know that because then, you’re in listening mode. The challenge is when you think you know something and you don’t. That’s a problem.

When we entered the space, we didn’t have any idea about what we’re doing. I don’t know anything about accounting. The most important thing that we did was have this email feature. When you sign-up for Expensify, roughly 30 minutes after the first email, you get a second email from me. It’s a pure text >>>

Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 2)

Sramana: If you were to position this in the context of 2009, when you founded the company, what would the competitive landscape look like? Who was your closest competitor?

Alex Fuller: That’s a good question. We were offering this system to a number of companies but the telecom sector was a key focus for us early on. We were getting our software, which was on Salesforce’s Force.com platform, on the roadmap of large enterprises who were otherwise looking at systems from Oracle, Siebel, and so on.

It’s a testament to the way that the cloud works that we were not required to acquire or manage the devices in the cloud ourselves, so we were able to focus on adding value. We were able to put intelligence into the software and create a layer of functionality and value that we were able to offer our customers. >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Who was your co-founder? How did you know him? Why him?

David Barrett: His name is Witold Stankiewicz. He was my first hire at Red Swoosh. After I got fired, within a couple of weeks, everyone else quit. I was what was really holding that team at Akamai. They brought in some other manager and everyone else left.

Sramana Mitra: That makes a lot of sense. What did you tell him about Expensify? Did you tell him the whole complexity around prepaid cards, expense reporting, and banking relationships?

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Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 1)

The Force.com platform has been a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Alex and Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform.

Sramana: Alex, let’s start with your personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial story?

Alex Fuller: I was born in Wimbledon in the UK where the tennis championship is held. My educational background was not focused on technology. I studied classics at Oxford University, which focused on Latin, Greek, and Linguistics. Before that, I had already acquired an interest in technology. I got into computing as a child when I was 12 years old. I had a keen interest in computing throughout my school years. >>>