Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 2)

Mary Oemig: We did what I would recommend to every single entrepreneur – a lot of listening tours. We talked to our future customers. We talked to teachers. We learned that teachers were trying to hire developers around the world to turn what they knew into games. They were losing a lot of money doing it, because they didn’t know how to manage developers.

We realized in the end that what we should develop is a creation platform with a student play platform based on best-in-breed knowledge about what you need to know about student performance in order to inform good next decisions about what to teach next. We trust that teachers know what content needs to be taught.

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 1)

Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership?

Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to understand what matters to them. When you’re scoping, what workloads are important for them? How are their customers buying? It’s those questions that you want to answer strategically.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian?

Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second.

Sramana Mitra: This is a crowded space. What was so special about HYCU?

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the sales side. How did you leverage the Citrix channel to reach the customer base?

Simon Taylor: I was in my late 20s. I flew to Fort Lauderdale where the Citrix headquarters was. I walked in and just said I wanted to talk to the Alliances team. I was introduced to Vicky Pomarico who was an Alliance Marketing at Citrix. She said, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your company does.” She spent about an hour with me. I said, “I just want to learn how we can be the best possible partner for you. What are the things that partners do that light you up?”

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of IP that didn’t quite get anywhere. SuccessFactors is a company that was built exactly how you did it. Lars Daalgard bought the IP at a Redwood City auction and repurposed it. This is a way of building companies if you can locate IP that has value.

Simon Taylor: When we did this, there were about 17 monitoring companies focused on Citrix. All of them were entrenched. Some of them were doing $30 million to $50 million in ARR. Some of them like Splunk were doing billions of dollars a year. Entering a very crowded market like that as a no-brand, the no-name individual is almost crazy.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You identified some Citrix monitoring IP. Where was this IP located?

Simon Taylor: It was in Slovenia. It became the technology capital of central Europe at that time. They have become incredibly adept at artificial intelligence. With what we’re seeing in Ukraine today and the attacks by Russia, it’s extremely concerning what’s going on in that region. We were fortunate. They were able to recreate upwards of a thousand jobs across the region.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 1)

Simon offers excellent insights into creating an unfair advantage with unique engineering team leverage in off-center locations. He also discusses creative channel strategy techniques.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?