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Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This is a wonderful story of a self-financed company that has built itself up to $10 million in profitable revenue. Led by Christophe Bach, an experienced and successful serial entrepreneur, it’s a text-book case study of effective bootstrapping.

Sramana: Christophe, to start, tell me your back story. Where are you from, where were you born?

Christophe: I am the Co-Founder and CEO of TextMe and prior to TextMe, I co-founded three companies in Europe. I was born and raised in Paris, France. I have been living between Paris and San Francisco for the last 15 years.

Sramana: Did you do college, university in Paris as well?

Christophe: Yes, I did.

Sramana: What is your background? Is it a technical background or business background?

Christophe: I went to an engineering school. They now call it Polytechnique.

Sramana: What did you do after polytechnique?

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Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 3)

Sramana: How did the business ramp in 2002?

Varun Shoor: It was quite interesting. I started receiving money at the very end of 2001, and then it kept coming in 2002. I kept telling my mom and dad that I had just earned $1,000 and they would not believe me. They made me show them where the money was and I would show them on the screen how much money I had made. They would not believe me. They told me that those were just numbers on a screen and that I had to show them the actual cash. I told them that I needed the bank wire details for the company that he had created for me but he was still hesitant to give it to me. I then asked him if I could order a laptop from that money instead and he told me that was fine. >>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you learn to program?

Varun Shoor: I learned to program when I was 13. We had x286 and x386 computers, so I started learning FoxPro and Visual FoxPro. This was in 1996. My father had a spare computer from his factory, so he gave it to me. I did not get a computer because I was interested in it. However, once I got it I became very interested in it.

Sramana: So you decided to create a customer support software package and make it open source. Why did you make that decision?

Varun Shoor: I had tried making money before and I had failed. I had wasted 75,000 rupees of my dad’s money doing web designing. I was in love with programming and creating products, so I decided to give it away as an open source project. >>>

Bootstrapped Journey of a Child Entrepreneur in India: Varun Shoor, CEO of Kayako (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

[Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India]

Varun Shoor is the founder and CEO of Kayako, a company offering advanced helpdesk management software. Varun steers the overall direction of the company and as customer experience fanatic and lead product architect, takes an active role in the design and development of Kayako. One of Varun’s greatest passions is design. Applying modern, consumer-like design to stuffy business helpdesk software was Varun’s brainchild, and with it he founded Kayako in 2001.

Sramana: Varun, let’s start with your personal story. Where are you from? What is the backstory to Kayako?

Varun Shoor: I was born in Jalandhar, a city in Punjab. I have had no formal education. I started Kayako when I was 17. My family background is industrial by nature. My father is into manufacturing, primary tools such as hammers.

Sramana: Does he work for himself?

Varun Shoor: He is also an entrepreneur. He grew his business into what it is today. He works for himself and he owns his factory. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 7)

Sramana: What are your primary customer acquisition methods?

Paras Chopra: We are starting to do a mix of marketing and sales. For the longest time we focused solely on our content marketing. We have tried AdWords, Salesforce and even LinkedIn marketing programs. What has worked for us is content marketing.

Sramana: This is the case with 1M/1M as well. I don’t think we would have existed without the amount of content we have produced.

Paras Chopra: It has to be good content. A lot of people think that churning out garbage content is the same thing. You obviously know it has to be quality content.

Sramana: What was your revenue at the end of March 2013?

Paras Chopra: We did around $3.5 million. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 6)

Sramana: It sounds like you had a very good conversion rate.

Paras Chopra: The conversion rate was around 10%. I also got some hate mail from users who expected the product to be free forever. They told me I should be ashamed of myself for charging money and pointed out that Google’s products were free. I had to defend myself and tell them that Google was a huge company, but I had to be able to support myself.

Sramana: You are running a business, not a charity. Those are the types of users that you do not want to have as customers anyways. There is a big difference between paying customers and free riders.

Paras Chopra: Free riders seem to have the loudest mouths, and it takes some thick skin to deal with them.

Sramana: You should only listen to customer feedback. Free rider feedback is irrelevant. It’s find to have free users when you are building a product. Once the product evolves, you only need to worry about those willing to pay. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 5)

Sramana: What timeframe was all of this work occurring?

Paras Chopra: I started coding the second version in December of 2009.

Sramana: You basically bootstrapped Wingify using your paycheck, correct?

Paras Chopra: Yes. I spent about $20 for a domain name and really had no major expenses. I really just invested my time. My living costs were covered because I was living with my parents. I did not need to spend any money. I would not go to parties. I spent all of my time working.

Sramana: How was the beta version of your new software received?

Paras Chopra: The comments were very encouraging. I ran a private beta and then I sent out invitations to blogs. Their readers got exclusive access to the software which worked well for me. That created a lot of groundswell and interest. I got a lot of users asking for demos and I received a lot of user feedback. I was very active in soliciting feedback from the users. That helped me define the product which was useful since I did not have a marketing background. >>>

Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 4)

Sramana: Did you build the entire project yourself or did you hire people to help you?

Paras Chopra: I paid about 50,000 rupees for a website design. I did a very basic product design myself. I launched the website on Hacker News, and the feedback I received was horrible. Nobody understood what I was trying to do. I called it a conversion rate real-time optimization platform, and nobody understood what that meant. I was caught in the trap of having an engineer’s mindset. The various algorithms I was using came very naturally to me, but they did not mean a lot to anyone else.

I also gave very little though regarding the usability of the product. If you were to log in to the product, you would see at least 25 to 30 options. I thought that it would be good to have as many options as possible. I did not realize that this was going to overwhelm and intimidate people. Overall the product launch was a very good learning opportunity for me. It was a bit disheartening because I had worked so hard and all of my past projects had failed as well. >>>