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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Entrepreneur Case Studies
Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 1)
Jeff is an English major who successfully bootstrapped a SaaS company with Services. The company eventually exited at a $130M valuation. Wonderful perspective from a non-technical founder on building a tech startup to success.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning and introduce yourself and Velocify to our audience.
>>>Non-Technical Founder Building a Tech Startup to over $10M: David Moricca, CEO of Socialive (Part 1)
We very often get questions on whether non-technical founders can build tech companies. David’s story is a really interesting one that touches many aspects of the 1Mby1M methodology.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
>>>Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: That’s still a horizontal issue though. Connectors are still horizontal plumbing. There are a finite set of data warehouse that you need to connect to. As long as you have those, you are good. Where is the vertical logic coming from?
Nitesh Chawla: Then we got through mapping workshops. We sit down with the business person and go through the process of understanding the business question, looking at the data, and doing some validation. We conduct workshops. We have deep domain knowledge of the banking sector now. I was always convinced it’s a collaboration. It’s an immersion process. Then we bring in that vertical knowledge into our technology layer.
>>>Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Why do you need 300 people? The demand meant bigger server investment. Where does the people angle come in?
Erik Allebest: We take our customer support very seriously. We believe that taking care of our community is a big deal. When you have five times as many active users, you need five times as many support agents. We scaled up our support team significantly. Also, we’ve been adding to our international team significantly. The amount of content and translations require larger teams to translate and take care of all of the international growth.
>>>Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: The main question I am asking is at what point did you start productizing?
Nitesh Chawla: We started thinking about it from a services perspective. One thing that’s true today is that in the mid-market, you must have a partnership services model attached to it. It needs human expertise along the way. Having said that, in about 2013 or 2014, we were doing our first demo of Aunsight 1.0. In 2013, we launched it. We came out with a data platform.
>>>Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What about the business model?
Erik Allebest: We didn’t know. At first, we thought we’d be selling ads against it. We quickly realized that it wasn’t going to pay for itself. Also, we didn’t love ads as users. But we had this content that we had bought along with the domain name called Chess Mentor. It was a teaching product. You would get a chessboard and you’d make a move. It’d tell you if it was good or bad, and why.
>>>Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: The other thing that you said is early validation. If you look at our work, we use different kinds of bootstrapping techniques. One of them is Bootstrapping using Services. What you’re describing is exactly that, which is going to customers and taking services projects with a specific problem domain in mind. Then you productize based on a bunch of projects.
Nitesh Chawla: Yes. You can bleed yourself and take a bunch of capital. Then you’re raising capital and selling what you have built. The second thing that happened was there were a couple of clients who believed in us.
>>>Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What happens next?
Erik Allebest: I had an internship at a big tech company. I wasn’t that interested in it. Frankly, I did a bunch of internships while I was at Stanford. Pretty much every person I met with at every big company wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. None of them love their jobs. That’s the honest truth. They want to talk about what I had done as an entrepreneur, which I thought was weird. It made me realize I’m not cut out for big companies.
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