Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much is the deal size now?

Senraj Soundar: Close to double. We have multiple products, but they are priced at a lower level.

Sramana Mitra: All through this evolution, have you continued to bootstrap or have you brought in any financing?

Senraj Soundar: Till now, we’re bootstrapping because we were able to, in the last couple of years, manage the company’s cash flow. We are continuously taking every dollar and throwing it to engineering. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A corollary question, whom do you see in deals?

Sash Sunkara: From a DR perspective, we often see Zerto. We used to see others too. Zerto has quite a strong foothold in the lower end service providers, more in the SMB space. We are starting to see some of them in enterprises. We’ve beaten them in quite a few of the enterprise deals. We do address enterprise complexity very well. In the cloud management space, we see competitors like Red Hat. In a pure migration deal, we sometimes we see Arasimi but not as much as we used to. There are internal tools as well. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What were the revenue levels in 2013 and 2014? How was the company growing?

Senraj Soundar: We were staying somewhere around 80% to 100% growth for the next two to three years.

Sramana Mitra: When did you hit $5 million in revenue?

Senraj Soundar: In the last two years.

Sramana Mitra: What else have you done in this time frame between when you started selling the product in >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 1)

A deep-dive into cloud infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Rackware.

Sash Sunkara: I’m the CEO and Founder of Rackware. My Co-Founder is Todd Matters. He’s my Chief Architect. We started Rackware in 2009. Rackware is a cloud management platform specifically targeted at mid-size to larger enterprises. We have a cloud management suite of products. We started off migrating applications into a variety of private and public clouds. Soon after, we introduced disaster recovery in the cloud. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start building this product?

Senraj Soundar: In 2008. It took several years to get it right because there’re a lot of moving parts. You have to seamlessly optimize your calling agent’s time. The calling agents are navigating the call. While they’re navigating the call, you have to show the sales rep what is going on. Sales rep has full visibility. The sales rep can tell the system, “Do not call this particular individual in the list.” >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the product? Can you talk a bit more about what was the product that you took that long to build?

Senraj Soundar: A good sales representative working hard typically makes 60 to 80 dials on average, but he could talk to only three to four decision makers or prospects. The challenge is that it takes about 20 plus phone calls to get one person live on the phone. All the remaining 19 won’t go anywhere.

If you do the math, about 90% of the phone time is all wasted time for the sales rep. Only 10% of that phone effort yields a >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Brand: Big Barker CEO Eric Shannon (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: From a consumer’s point of view, it’s confusing. How do you convey that there’s something that is worth paying a premium for?

Eric Shannon: We just have a standard reply. We’re not going to reference any competitor directly here. All we can say is do your research, check their warranty, do they have any background in the pet industry? It’s the whole private-label thing, which I think is a scummy business to be in because you’re not really adding any value to the world whatsoever. This is going to be one of Amazon’s biggest problems going forward. You have 45 people all selling the same rubber spatula just with different brand >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Senraj Soundar, CEO of ConnectLeader (Part 1)

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

Senraj has bootstrapped his company to over $10M in revenue and is contemplating raising some growth capital now. He will, most likely, have numerous offers from investors. We love stories like this that reinforce our philosophy: “Do not go to VCs as beggars, go as kings!”

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?

Senraj Soundar: I was born and brought up in India, particularly in Southern India. I got my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical >>>