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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So your system recommends where to move the dollars to?

John Wallace: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How do you sell this solution? What part of your organization is buying and how is the sales cycle? >>>

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit more about some of the granular details of specific elements?

OJ Whatley: In 2000, I walked into a watch store and I happened to pick up these hardcover books on the history of Panerai. They were like coffee table books. I went on eBay and found about eight of these in different languages. I noticed that they were selling from $100 to $150 each. I asked everyone who was working with me at that software company and found out that you could call Panerai on the 800 number and ask them to send these books to you and they would send them to you for free. I had my co-workers order these books and I would take them out for lunch in exchange for getting me these books. I would then sell them on eBay for anywhere between $50  to $300. That was a big piece of my capital.

Sramana Mitra: Was that also getting you in touch with people who are passionate about Panerai?

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like you discovered the business need by recognizing the lack of tools for CFOs, and that you discovered the lack of those tools while you were working as a CFO consultant. Is that a correct statement?

Rob Hull: Yes, that is. There were not good tools for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analytics. I needed tools that allowed two-way collaboration with the managers throughout a company or an organization.

Sramana: Let’s talk about the founding of Adaptive Insight with a bit more circumstantial details. What exactly triggered the idea and how did you validate that idea?

Rob Hull: I was actually moving from company to company putting together financial models. I was helping businesses understand what their key drivers were and how they could be controlled. I helped these companies evaluate how they looked at cash flow. I wanted to get management engaged and involved in that process. Excel was a poor tool for that workflow. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you could be more granular, how do you account for that? What data can you work off of and how do you tie that to how you charge?

John Wallace: I thought you were going in the direction of how I know what they spend. So you mean how do we measure TV?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

John Wallace: We measure all channels simultaneously. The technique that we use comes from the field of medical research. In a study, you can’t infect people on purpose to see the spread of the disease and you can’t withhold life-saving drugs if there’s no discovery. But you still have people trying to understand how this disease affects the population. >>>

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why watches?

OJ Whatley: I’ve always loved watches. Even going back to my days as a 10-year-old, I was always enamored of watches.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a passion.

OJ Whatley: Yes. The price points were $10 to $300. I was always obsessed with watches and I’ve been wearing a watch since I was about 12 years old. It evolved. It started with Star Wars R2-D2 and Darth Vader watches. I wear some of them on a chain around my neck. It progressed to Casio calculator-type of watches and watches that would play music. Then it progressed to the freestyle sports watches and Casio G-Shocks.

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 2)

Sramana: What timeframe does that bring us to?

Rob Hull: That brings us up to 1999. Our CEO had decided he was going to be leaving and the world was moving quickly outside of RMS. The Internet was going strong and the dot com boom was going in full force. I looked around and realized that I had a good run at RMS. I worked with fantastic people and it was a fantastic company to be a part of. I decided I was ready to look for a new challenge so I left RMS at the end of 1999. >>>

Trend-Spotting: UltraLight Startups

If you are intrigued by how a 32-person company can be acquired for $19 billion, you must pay attention to the ultra-light startup trend. We’re doing case study after case study on the 1M/1M blog on this trend, so that you can get a diverse but visceral feel for how entrepreneurs are building these businesses. 1M/1M itself is an ultra-light startup, and we firmly believe in this method of building and scaling companies: efficient, highly productive, technology, not people driven strategies.

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were the backgrounds of these other two companies? Were they using a vertical approach?

John Wallace: No, they’re horizontal. I think what they have in common is that they have simplified the problem by collecting data off of Excel. They try to get themselves on the website. It makes the day of living hell more uniform. We’ve taken a different approach to on-board people’s data because for a lot of people that we want to analyze, we can’t pick up the data off of Excel anyway. We might have to on-board data a little deeper. We just said, “Let’s go ahead and be a completely open system.”

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