Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Chart (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? You talked about your early financing. Talk about the rest of the financing history of the company.

Ben Dilts: It was in early 2011 that we raised a little over $1 million. We rolled that early friends and family money into that same round. That kept us rolling for a while. We have a culture of being frugal. We’ve never raised money with the idea that we’d have to raise money again. We raised about $1 million, and it officially closed in summer of 2011. I don’t think we ever burned half of it.

We, very much, looked at it as money that we need to operate right now. At the time, we were not profitable. We were definitely burning a little bit of money. We needed to cross this line fast. Pretty rapidly, we had caught up in revenue to what we were spending. We chased that line where we were only growing >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Moshe Vaknin, CEO of YouAppi (Part 1)

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

Moshe has been doing startups for 18 years now. Some have worked, some not so well. This time around, he is building something bigger and more robust than his prior outings. Read Moshe Vaknin’s inspiring journey through startup land.

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?

Moshe Vaknin: I was born in Israel and grew up in a city by the beach called Ashkelon. It finds a mention in the Bible. Samson and Delilah were from that city. I was born there and grew up there until the age of 18. I went to the military and spent three years there. After you finish with military, you typically don’t know what to do in life. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Chart (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where are we in terms of chronology? You figure all these optimizations out at what point? Until what point is it primarily an SEO and content marketing-driven strategy? At what point do you layer on top of the paid search strategy?

Ben Dilts: I have to go back and look. It was really in 2014 that we started spending a lot of time, energy, and money on paid search. We layered that on and that became a good channel for us. I want to emphasize that we didn’t figure out the optimization of that funnel. That optimization is ongoing. In fact, we have some experiments going on right now that are showing promising results in the area of double-digit improvements in our conversion rates. That is an everlasting battle.

At this point, we have a team of 10 people. There are a couple of developers on there an a couple of analysts. That whole team’s job is to improve the funnel. >>>

Raising Money From Eighty Investors and Steering to a Successful Exit: Ludovic Huraux, CEO of Attractive World (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Boredom doesn’t create happiness.

Ludovic Huraux: Yes. I really try to keep it in mind. We think about the future all the time, “In the future, I will be happier because I’ll get something.” It doesn’t work like that. You really need to learn to be in the present and really enjoy what happens in your life and to accept failures. Maybe you lost your confidence or it didn’t work as you wanted, but you have to accept it and be resilient. It’s what I’m trying to do. It’s not easy.

Sramana Mitra: Great. You started another company. How is it doing? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Chart (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your source of bringing people onto the site is all content marketing and SEO?

Ben Dilts: There are a couple of channels that have turned out to be tremendous sources of users. Early on, we were featured in the launch of the Chrome web store, which was a big deal with the Chrome team at that time. I think it has faded in popularity since then. It was, essentially, what showed up on your new tab page in the Google Chrome.

They had a marketplace there wherein you could list your applications. We got listed in the launch. We were very well-reviewed by the  users who found us there. It grew to be one of the top five installed apps in the first year after it was launched. When it launched, that channel immediately accounted for more >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did he figure out in terms of how you acquire customers? What is the business model? What is the pricing model for your product?

Ben Dilts: One piece of real concrete skill that Dave brought to the table was that he had a history in SEO. He had a good handle on how it worked and how to win. He did a tremendous job on making our website attractive to search engines and the self-serve funnel to flow well. That was a great decision early on because we didn’t have the manpower or the money to hire the manpower to hit the pavement and find customers for this.

We really needed people to come in and pay us. We needed a lot of those. We focused hard on the fundamentals of a self-serve business. The conversion rate >>>

Raising Money From Eighty Investors and Steering to a Successful Exit: Ludovic Huraux, CEO of Attractive World (Part 4)

Ludovic Huraux:The US VCs said, “You have a very interesting model. It’s profitable but it doesn’t mean that it will succeed in the US.” They were scared to invest in a French startup. I was very frustrated. I decided to focus on the French market. I explained to my shareholder that I wasn’t the best manager to take care of the operation in France. I told them that I wanted to build a startup in the US.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was Karl based?

Ben Dilts: He’s based here in Utah. As I mentioned, he moved here with his family. He was living here. He had left Google at that time and was looking around and seeing what he wanted to get involved with locally. He had spent most of his time at Mountain View.

Sramana Mitra: He had relationships with Google and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He had worked before joining Google doing startups as a lawyer working on startup rounds and M&A. That was a great bootstrap to get us started there.

Ben Dilts: Yes

Sramana Mitra: When does this all come together timeline-wise? >>>