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.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By December, you had the MVP. How many of the other customers came on board?

Slava Bronfman: Just a handful in the first quarter of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What was the incident to make you realize that you had to pivot?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why Art.com?

Josh Chodniewicz: This was in 1994. It was a while ago. A buddy of mine called me up. He was at Virginia Tech. He was getting his Computer Science degree there. He said, “Josh, I know something that’s going to be huge one day – the internet.” We started talking about it.

I bought myself a modem and started playing around with it. We brainstormed in a diner in New Jersey. Nobody was using it. To give context, one out of 800 Americans had an email address in 1994.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve finished this accelerator program and you’ve got some mentors. What was your trajectory? Were you building a product first? Were you talking to customers? Where did the validation of your idea come from?

Slava Bronfman: We were a bit naive. We just started building the product. Our product is very tech-heavy. We were thinking that two guys can just build the product. We understood that it’s not the case. The right thing to do is to build a nice presentation and approach investors. We had a big mission here and we needed a lot of people to build the product.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 1)

Josh bootstrapped for 10 years before raising a $30M first round of funding.

Read on to learn more about his journey.

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

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 1)

Slava was a Cyber Security geek in the Israeli military. In this interview, he tells the story of his transition to a successful entrepreneur.

Cybellum has been acquired by LG but continues to operate as an independent business unit subsidiary within the conglomerate. Awesome story with numerous lessons for geeks who aspire to be entrepreneurs.

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?

Israeli Founders Building a FinTech Venture: Omri Dor, Co-Founder and COO of Obligo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Have you done any of these integrations?

Omri Dor: Generally yes.

Sramana Mitra: At what point in your evolution did integration start to happen?

Omri Dor: I would say that’s a part of the never-ending product-market fit search. You start your work in New York. Then you start to leave. What do you find? Larger landlords and property managers use different software that requires integrations. They will say, “I will not work with your product unless you’re fully integrated.” You keep finding these blocks. Do you change your product or go after a different market?