Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you get from your friends and family to start this company?

Ike Kavas: Less than $200,000.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these four people in India?

Ike Kavas: I did a lot of research on companies that can develop software. I interviewed companies from Ukraine, Russia, and India. This company passed my test. >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was your next move after you came out of school? It sounds like you came back to Denver?

Patrick Quinlan: I did. I’d been planning on joining the Peace Corps and was accepted, but due to some health issues, I was not able to go forward with my training. I needed a job. So, I got a job at a small company that sold recording systems for businesses. But I got fired within a week, because it didn’t make sense to me what they were asking me to do.

I apparently gave too strong of an opinion to the owner on how he should run his business. I ended up getting a job a couple of >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Ike has bootstrapped Ephesoft and turned a relatively small $3.2 million investment into $12 million in 2016 revenue. Excellent execution.

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

Ike Kavas: I was born and raised in Turkey. I’m from a very small village. My dad was a math teacher at the same school that I went to. Right after high school, I left to study Electronics Engineering. After graduating, I worked for a few companies and I got introduced >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

You learn from successes. You learn a lot more from mistakes and failures. Patrick freely discusses various missteps in his journey and how he managed to pivot out of various corners. Excellent discussion.

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?

Patrick Quinlan: I was born in Germany to a German mother and an American father. I spent most of my formative years in Germany and growing up very much in a German family. I moved to the States in my junior high years. I ended >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn about the target customer segment? You said you started catering to tech startups. Where was the business coming from as you grew? What were you learning about customer acquisition?

Isaac Oates: There are some really big things that we learned. One is that it’s really hard to control when someone switches a product like this. Every company has some solution. You can’t exist without it. It’s very sticky and people don’t want to switch. We went into it thinking, “We’re going to smile and dial and then we’ll convince them that our stuff is great.” The reality is it’s a long play.

In many cases, a company will think about switching but it just won’t be worth the hassle. We realized that we had much less >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Who were you dialing? What was the process of targeting and positioning?

Isaac Oates: I always think about what I would do differently, I would say that we probably brought on a sales team a little bit later than we could have. We had a website and people could come in and sign up. We had a database of hundreds of companies in New York who had heard of us one way or another. Those were the people we started calling. Once we exhausted that, we looked at what we were succeeding with.

The companies we were succeeding with were small tech startups. They’re early adopters. It always resonated with them. The size >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?

Isaac Oates: I got a lot of help initially. It was pretty easy and there was a lot of luck involved. When I was at Etsy, one of the members of their Board was an investor. I know Danny who’s on Etsy’s Board. I told him that I would start a new company. He was like, “Great. You should come talk to us at Index.” A couple of weeks later, we had money in the bank from there. I also raised some money from my co-founders at my last company.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise as your first round of funding? You’re raising money on a concept? >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you have to stay at Etsy?

Isaac Oates: I was there for three years. It was pretty crazy actually. While I was there, I kept thinking about my time at Adtuitive. There were three founders and I was the one doing all of the paperwork, payroll, and insurance. I spent a lot of time with our fax machine.

I thought, “There’s got to be a way to use a computer to do all these things.” While I was at Etsy, I started to think about what I would do after Etsy. I kept coming back over and over again to this problem. Everybody that I talked to was petrified of >>>