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.

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much seed funding did you get?

Nitesh Chawla: I don’t remember, but it was enough to pay salaries for multiple individuals.

Sramana Mitra: Like in the hundreds of thousands?

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 2)

Erik Allebest: In 1998, my Chess Club President friend said, “Let’s build a website together.” He built a platform for me to sell Chess equipment online. It became known as Wholesale Chess. It became the largest chess retailer online. This was before Amazon. I sold the business of teaching and moved to e-commerce. I did that for many years. I became tired of doing that.

My wife was urging me to do something else. She applied to business school for me and got me to Stanford. I sold the equipment business and ended up in Stanford where I was very underqualified to be there from an education standpoint.

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is the journey of a lot of techies into entrepreneurship as well. It’s not about technology looking for a problem to solve. It’s about identifying the problem and then figuring out how to solve that problem using technology. In AI, this is a major issue.

Nitesh Chawla: It truly is.

Sramana Mitra: This is why domain knowledge is important. It’s very difficult for AI experts to come up with a problem to solve. They know the technology side of it. They don’t really know what the problems are. We’re seeing this massive interest in the AI segment now for people who have domain expertise.

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 1)

Solo entrepreneurs get a bad rap, but they’re kicking ass out there!

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?

Erik Allebest: I was born in Southern California. I was born to an entrepreneurial family. My dad was an entrepreneur. My mom had many varied interests. She gets credit for teaching me how to play chess at eight. I’m too young to remember the story, but she taught me how the pieces moved. We proceeded to play one game of chess together and she never played with me again. That’s the lore she likes to tell.

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 1)

Nitesh bootstrapped Aunalytics while keeping his academic job at Notre Dame.

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

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Once you had the Series A, what was the next major inflection point? What strategic moves did you make to get to that?

Jeremy Swift: I would say it was about just further refinement of what our ICP was and figuring out go-to-market too. That was a hard thing to navigate. It took us years to figure out. Just because you raise venture capital, it doesn’t immediately change those things for you. There’s still a lot of hard work.