Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing the software work?

Brent Jackson: We have a team in India. I’m a sole founder. One of the investors at the last company had a lot of ties to consultants in India. We used them to build the first prototype.

Sramana Mitra: What about the earliest customers? Did you go back to the people you were working with?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the MVP that you came up with? You had worked in that domain and created a vision for what would be the product that you wanted to go out with. You say it’s accidental, but a lot of developers transitioning to entrepreneurs encounter problems in their work life and go on to solve that problem. It is a common path.

By the time you were in the second one, you had a very deep view having worked with thousands of customers. Out of all that you observed, what was the minimum that you could start getting into the market with?

Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 1)

Brent was a solo founder starting up a Fintech company. Read on how he put one foot before the other to navigate his journey.

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?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start?

Mahendra Alladi: From 2006 to 2007, we were doing services. With HP, there was also a bit of a services element. I was really representing HP to their customers. There, I had a much bigger exposure. That opened up my understanding of this domain.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get into HP?

From Developer to Successful Entrepreneur with Exit: ACCELQ CEO Mahendra Alladi (Part 1)

Mahendra transitioned from a developer to a successful entrepreneur with his first company, exited it, and then started ACCELQ. ACCELQ already has 200 customers and is a profitable, bootstrapped company growing fast. A wonderful and inspiring 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?

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to come up with a product?

Manish Jethani: This is very interesting. We signed an agreement with one customer that if we deliver that product, they will pay us $50,000.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customer?

Manish Jethani: This was the largest food-tech delivery company in India. They were scaling hyper-fast. They didn’t have a team. After we got such strong validation, we started building the product. From my past learning, it was obvious that unless we have a very strong intent from the customer, we’re not going to build the product. The first version was out in four months. It didn’t have a lot of functionality. It wasn’t self-serve yet.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you launched this, how did you get it off the ground? The problem you’re describing is a very large problem and there are a lot of people working on this. Data, as you know, has become one of the biggest categories in which people are doing startups. The combination of data and machine learning has become very big.

A lot of people have observed that there are non-technical people trying to make data-driven decisions. They need tools and technologies to do this. This is not a virgin field. Timeline-wise, you were in the middle of a big wave. The solution to this for digital marketing than the solution for the supply chain. Where did you start? Talk about the process of getting this venture off the ground.

From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing a hosted product until recently.

Francis Dinha: Yes. Even Bloomberg came to us. They said, “What about if we license your software? We pay you half a million dollars one time.” I said no. Our model is subscription. Google was our customer for three years. They used our self-hosted solution. Then they wanted to have so many features. I said, “You can take our open source and build on your own.” They did that.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very good point – saying no to certain opportunities. It’s an important part of building a business. You have to stick to your vision.