Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 3)

Jeff Solomon: A buddy of mine went to get his MBA. He was also an engineer. He was working on the side for me. When he graduated, the one thing that he learned was that to build a scalable business, you needed an asset.

Sramana Mitra: Not just services.

Jeff Solomon: He came to me and said, “This service business is cool, but you need to do something that is going to have some real equity value. He suggested a SaaS business. I went to look at all the projects I’ve been doing. I saw some similarities. We were doing a lot of the same things for a lot of similar clients. I started to think about a SaaS application that we could build for these people. That was how Velocify was born. We worked nights and weekends on Velocify while we were consulting for other companies. After six months, we launched this SaaS lead management platform.

Non-Technical Founder Building a Tech Startup to over $10m: David Moricca, CEO of Socialive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to build in the first iteraton?

David Moricca: The original vision was an online music creation platform targeting young people. It’s called Breakout Band. We created one of the first music creation platforms. It had a beatmaker where you can create your own beats. You can add your own vocals in the vocal booth. It was a consumer product oriented around younger people.

Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To underscore what you said about joining the software industry in a business development role, it’s a common path for non-technical people. What you’re describing is a very good example of how entrepreneurs with non-technical backgrounds make their way to technology entrepreneurship.

Jeff Solomon: Yes. I learned a lot about how it all worked and what didn’t work. I resonated with the tech team that was there. I was interested. I decided to start a tech company. I decided to start with five friends which I do not recommend. We had six co-founders which is too many. A couple of them I went to high school with. A couple of them I went to college with.

Non-Technical Founder Building a Tech Startup to over $10M: David Moricca, CEO of Socialive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have a political science and law background. Then you went to McKinsey to do some consulting work. This brings us to 2006 now?

David Moricca: 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What happens then?

David Moricca: I was itching to move from consulting into more of an operational role. Because of my previous background and my interest in education and combined with media, Scholastic jumped out at me. I had an offer with Google. Google had not yet gone public.

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.