Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 1)

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

John worked on Minority Report after finishing his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. Read on how he parlayed that experience into a supercool company that is scaling nicely, while reinventing collaboration.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were you born, raised and in what kind of background?

John Underkoffler: I was born in a hospital in Philadelphia but from the time I was a few months old until I left for college, I lived in a very small town in Southeastern Pennsylvania. My parents had bought a farm. I grew up in a non-working farm, but it was populated with lots and lots of creatures and that kind of proximity to nature had a big effect on my design practice in later years. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 1)

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

Taylor has bootstrapped Wiredrive over a 17-year period to about $10 million. Today, he has options ahead to grow organically or raise money. Either way, an interesting journey.

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?

Taylor Tyng: I was born south of Boston, Massachusetts in a town called Duxbury. I was born the son of two entrepreneurs who went through a line of businesses from early plastic mold injection technology companies and ended up working in a luxury travel business. I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early. I was raised in a middle class setting and my parents made sure that they raised children who were thoughtful and mindful. I had a real good platform to practice >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking when you became profitable?

Guy Mucklow: It was four years after we started, so 2005. It’s interesting because it begs the question of going down the VC route or bootstrapping. Increasingly, a lot of tech entrepreneurs that I meet who have taken funding regret doing that. I know you’re in the game, so you see the value of it.

Sramana Mitra: In our program, there is a very clear philosophy that you bootstrap first and raise money later, or not at all.

Guy Mucklow: I think that makes total sense, because I have seen so many startups start with a view of almost a load of mud, throwing it at a wall, and seeing what sticks. They’ve not been very pragmatic. If you’re living off your own capital, you are more careful about it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s try to accelerate and cover a bit more of the story so that it’s a complete story. What is the next major strategic move or inflection point where your business accelerates and what was the driver? >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of conversion rates did you experience? Are you willing to discuss that?

Christian Vanek: Sure, we’re an open book. From our website, we have about 1% conversion rate of visitors to trial or free customers. From free customers to paid customers, we have about 0.7% conversion rate. For our trial customers that come in directly as a paid trial from the website and don’t go through the free tier, 23% of those will convert to a paid monthly account, which is a pretty good conversion rate.

Sramana Mitra: That’s an excellent conversion rate. I take it that’s your main business? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you selling for? What was your business model and pricing model? How were you monetizing your product?

Guy Mucklow: I might have mentioned earlier that we had two main licensing models in the early days because we saw mass market potential for this kind of service. We looked to go down a very lightweight transactional base licensing model. Let’s say $50 would buy you a thousand lookups. Those lookups would be valid for a 12-month period.

Our customer would come to us. They would buy the credit packs. We would get paid upfront. That model still exists today. The typical experience for our customer was that they would buy online and get invoiced online. That invoice information was being stored against their account. When it came to renewals, >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are expecting that somewhere in the near future, you’re going to be able to access some Federal funding to educate low-income students. You’re going to be part of the government’s resources to deal with the education of a large number of students?

Adrian Ridner: Absolutely. The pilot program is initially in the test phase. We were selected for that. Assuming there’s a monitoring agency associated with the program that’s going to look at the outcomes of the program for the students themselves, we expect that it will scale over time. There’s a lot of talk around free college and providing college access. I will say that this program is one of the first things I’ve seen where that’s doable when you look at the logistics part of it because it brings the cost of a degree to sub-$8,000 instead of $40,000. It’s the best path I’ve seen to convert some of those promises of accessibility and equal access to education into a reality. >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions on this. First, talk to me about your freemium strategy. What did you offer for free and what did you offer for premium?

Christian Vanek: What we offer for free now is probably too much. That comes back down to the cultural problems in my organization. I tend to undervalue software so we tend to give a lot of it away. One way that we competed against the other freemium products was we didn’t limit the number of responses you could collect. We didn’t limit the number of questions or pages. We’ve tried various mixes over the years. That made us incredibly popular because you could do so much with our software. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that your main competitive strategy in winning accounts that would use your software for their sales enhancement process was to find them through different channels where you were not facing competitors?

Guy Mucklow: Largely. I guess, it was also about the way in which we sold. We had a major focus on delivering an incredibly good self-serve customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I would like to hear a little bit about is the product-side differentiation. You talked about finding touch points with customers where you had less competition. Was there product-side differentiation also?

Guy Mucklow: There have been two major product innovations in our business. If I can relate it back to the overall vision of the business, which is to >>>