Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You went to a pharma company before you had a product?

Rotem Shor: We developed a concept. Then we developed the MVP. We launched it to users. We launched the product and saw that users were coming. We did a lot of guerilla marketing. We combined it all together. We gained traction. We got strong feedback from patients on what to do and how to improve. Today, we are rated 4.7 in the app stores with more than 450,000 reviews by patients.

Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 1)

Rotem represents yet another point of view of a software developer/technologist who successfully transitioned to an entrepreneur in an unfamiliar domain: pharmaceutical.

In that journey, he paired up with his brother who was more the business person in the duo. This is a common strategy for developers to become entrepreneurs, although, I generally
believe that developers can learn the business side as well.

The story also traces the pivots that were necessary to find product-market fit, as well as the failures that triggered each pivot.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Getting companies fundable is a high-touch process. That is not necessarily a scalable process. I would say we may be the only accelerator in the world that has done some scalability on that. We have created a lot of curriculum. We’ve done so many now. It’s like pattern matching. That takes time.

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve released a large chunk of our curriculum on Udemy. Udemy has 50 million users. My point is, if you take on the job of trying to coach these people, that is very difficult. Then comes the issue of leading the round or just following.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after Art.com?

Josh Chodniewicz: We were in San Francisco. I moved to New York and lived a couple of years there. Frankly, I think I dealt with an identity crisis. All I knew was Art.com. I had to get around that. I started making investments in startups. I saw quite a bit of success in that.

Sramana Mitra: What did you invest in that really did well?

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 5)

Slava Bronfman: It was a better year in terms of sales. Earlier, a lot of our sales were based on physical conferences. It’s hard to compete as a small startup. If you go to a conference and you have a small booth, it’s hard to compete. Now remote working levels the playing field. We felt that it was easier for us to approach customers remotely. We have customers around the globe. We have customers in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. It was relatively easier than before.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard this from a lot of startups. The pandemic has been a boon for them for exactly the same reasons.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are now in 2004?

Josh Chodniewicz: 2001 was when we acquired Art.com. Then 2004 was when we raised $30 million and combined it with our leading competitor at that time called AllPosters. I called up the other CEO and said, “We can shoot bullets at each other or we can join and shoot them at the rest of the world.” We put the businesses together in 2005.

Sramana Mitra: You ran the company?

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re giving a lot of automotive examples. Is that one of the areas where you entered the market?

Slava Bronfman: Yes, we wanted to start with one segment that we can really understand well. We started with automotive. Today, we are in other segments like medical devices and industrial IoT. When we started, we were laser-focused on the automotive segment.

Sramana Mitra: When you were designing the product, did you have a design partner?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue trajectory with search engine and affiliate marketing as the drivers?

Josh Chodniewicz: The other consumer driver for us was our partnership with eBay in 1998 to list our products. We were talking to eBay about why their marketplace didn’t have the traction. The problem was their listing fee. They were charging a 10-cent listing fee.