Featured Videos

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 5)

Sramana: Can you give me some idea about how the company ramped in terms of users beyond May 2012 when you brought to market the product with the more advanced functionality.

Christophe: We had 9 million downloads at the end of 2012. Today we have 20 million.

Sramana: That’s pretty fast. May 2012 to December 2013, 20 million – that’s good ramp. Can you talk about monetization? I understand that you already are a $10 million company. Tell me more about how did that happen?

Christophe: As a startup, before even creating the company, we had the business model in mind. We said: “Well, we need to give this for free and we need to make sure that the business model is working.” Very early on with my partner we consulted a lot of networks and potential partners to make sure that our business would be a real business from day one. The first day we launched the product, there was some advertisement.

>>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 7)

Sramana: What does your management team look like today?

Varun Shoor: We have four members of our senior management team. Raghav Arora is our VP of Operations. He was the first employee of Kayako and was a school mate of mine. He has helped the company grow from inception. James Edwards is based out of London and is our Chief Operating Officer. He joined the company in 2005. He was a former client who was very active on our forums. He started small, working for us on a contract basis. As things ramped up, he started taking on more responsibilities. Today, he manages the remote team and directs us on key product decisions. We are in the process of opening an office in London and he will lead that office. Our Director of Customer Service is also a key position. He joined the company in 2008, and he looks after that team. >>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 4)

Sramana: After you launched the product in three months, what kind of ramp did you see in terms of adoption?

Christophe: That’s a long time ago. Julien, have you seen the historical figures lately?

Julien: Yeah, I did. If you talk about 2011, I want to say the numbers would look small for now. I would say the first two months, you are probably talking 15,000 to 20,000 new signups first month or so?

Christophe: It grew quite quickly to more than a 100,000 per month.

Sramana: What was the user count at the end of the 2011 for example?

>>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 6)

Sramana: How much have you been able to accomplish with your new engineering team when it comes to maturing your product?

Varun Shoor: I personally believe the product is evolving. Our engineering practices can still use additional maturing although my teams believe we have evolved to a point where we are able to really leverage our Agile processes to provide innovative features. Despite that I hope to accomplish a lot more. Having a sound engineering practice in India can be difficult because the culture is so focused on the services aspect of business, not on product businesses.

Kayako is one of the more mature products in the market. Everyone is latching onto channels and service. Over the years we have had a product which allows an organization to handle inputs on many different channels. We have stable and efficient Live Chat support. We have great remote desktop support. We have some very large customers. We know competition is coming but we have out segment that we are very satisfied with. >>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 3)

Sramana: Were you bringing them to San Francisco without salary?

Christophe: No. They had salary within TextMe from day one.

Sramana: Okay. That’s interesting. That brings me to the next question, which is what was the financial structure of the company? Were you putting in some of your own money from your prior successes to start this off?

Christophe: Yes, exactly. We invested $600,000 in the company to start with and that would allow compensation for the co-founders. But the important thing is that with this very complete team of co-founders, we were self-sustainable from day one. We have been able to work for at least 12 to 18 months, mostly the four of us, with a very controlled need for part-time people and some consultants. But mainly, the work has been done by the team of co-founders from the beginning. That allows you to actually not have to raise external money because you don’t need to buy talent outside of your co-founding team.

>>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 5)

Sramana: Did your dad mentor you or help you as you were starting Kayako?

Varun Shoor: I went to him for feedback but the feedback he was able to give was from a different industry. He was accustomed to dealing with factory laborers. Apart from that, he did help me when it came to managing finances and ensuring I was meeting government regulations. He also gave me advice when I started to look for an office. I started off looking for a smaller space with around 2,000 square feet. He encouraged me to look for a space 3 or 4 times larger and it turns out he was right. We have been in our current office for 7 years. Our office was designed to seat 45 people and we now have 100 people crammed into that space now. >>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 2)

Sramana: Okay. Let’s talk about what is the premise with which you started TextMe, Christophe?

Christophe: In 2010, we were looking at new opportunities and that was the time when some other mobile communication apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango were in the market and I felt there was still a strong opportunity to do something very different and better. It was to build a universal communication app.

By universal communication app, I mean an app that would allow you to talk to anyone in the world, to not only the people who have your apps, but anybody who has a phone number. In any way you want, with voice call, with text, with video call and from anywhere you want, speaking from your telephone, from your iPad, from your Tablet and all this for free. That was something that was not doable using WhatsApp, because with WhatsApp you can only do text and with someone who has WhatsApp. If you have Tango you can do video call, but only with people who have Tango. Our concept was to bring a universal free communication app for the market and that’s what we did in early 2011.

>>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 4)

Sramana: Let’s drill down into how you built the company. What were the milestones in the early development of Kayako?

Varun Shoor: As the business started picking up, I started to recognize what was important to continued growth. The most important aspect was trust. In 2002, if someone emailed support@kayako.com and expressed interest in buying the product; I did not want them to know it was just me running the company. I created several different identities for myself. I would respond with a note that they had contacted the wrong department at Kayako and that I would forward their request on to the sales department. I would then respond from a different account identity so that I gave the impression of being a larger company. If they knew I was a 17 year old kid on the other side of the world, they never would have purchased the product. >>>