Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you joined the company where they were going to do homebuilder, but then the company imploded. Did you talk about one or two companies?

Peter Ord: One company. The company I joined had a product that catered to automotive dealers. They also aspired to build a similar product for homebuilders.

Sramana Mitra: That automotive product did work. In that implementation, you learned that the implementation was cumbersome and complex. Is that what you’re saying?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 1)

We’re big fans of solo entrepreneurs. Peter validated his business with real paying customers before he raised money; always the best strategy.

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?

Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Funding was happening in Israel?

Rotem Shor: Seed and Series A was in Israel. In Round B, non-Israeli venture funds joined.

Sramana Mitra: By Series B, you had the third client?

Rotem Shor: Yes, but we had more of a thesis. We still got traction from users.

Sramana Mitra: How much money are we talking? Seed was $1 million.

Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the first one get the users?

Rotem Shor: They paid a very small amount of money. It was not only for a specific medication. They developed it as a tool. The second was very specific for their drug. We found out later that it is much harder than we thought.

Sramana Mitra: So what did you do?

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?