Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start selling products as opposed to just services?

Chris Taylor: We started that shift in 2010. The journey was a much longer one that I expected. We were running at our typical parent consulting margins of 20% to 40% depending on the project and the year. We decided that year that we’re going to roll all the profits back in. We’re going to stop trying to make a profit and invest in product development thinking that that would be a year turnaround on that investment. That transition took three and a half to four years to really make for a lot of reasons.

One, is it is hard to change the DNA of a company that has been doing consulting into one that’s focused on product. It’s not impossible like some people say, >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who were the target audience for this product?

David Stubenvoll: We wanted the interest and attention of consumers in order to sell advertising to various financial players. One of our biggest advertisers were mutual fund companies and brokers.

Sramana Mitra: How did it ramp? How did you get the consumer base to attract the attention of these advertisers?

David Stubenvoll: Honestly, it was a lot of luck. There were a couple of other personal finance sites out there at that time and we were able to stay ahead of the curve and offer premium information for free. It was typical PR. We didn’t do much advertising ourselves. The Internet was very small at that point. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: After you moved to the Bay Area, what were the next major strategic moves?

Philippe d’Offay: After moving to the Bay Area, we had a product that physicians were very happy with. We were cash flow positive for four straight years. I talked about almost being bankrupt when we were in Atlanta. The turning point was we also had our first opportunity to be profitable. We maintained that momentum. We came to the Bay Area with a profitable company and with a product that was well-respected. We were generating almost 100% of our year over year revenue in new customers through word of mouth.

Sramana Mitra: That, by the way, is the point to move to the Bay Area. If you have any aspiration of moving to the Bay Area, that is the point when you should move. If you move before doing those things and that level of validation, you basically get killed. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this when you were the only employee?

Chris Taylor: 2006. That’s how it started. For the first couple of years, I did a lot of different projects around the auto industry and also for a lot of startups out in the West Coast.

Sramana Mitra: You were consulting at that point?

Chris Taylor: Yes, I was consulting services and looking to develop products out of that. One of our values today is being customer-inspired. That comes from those early days where we would get in and learn our customer’s problems by being in the trenches with them and trying to extract a horizontal value proposition out of those. We had a couple of different products. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did Gulp do?

David Stubenvoll: We were your very typical startup in that we wandered a little bit. We started out providing mutual fund information on the Internet. It blossomed into creating websites for mutual funds. We actually created a trading platform, and became one of the larger personal finance sites on the Internet. It was called Net Worth. We sold the entire business to Intuit, and Net Worth became Quicken.com.

Sramana Mitra: I see. That was a pretty major product for Intuit.

David Stubenvoll: This was the website – not Quicken itself. In the end, we brought the Internet foundation to Intuit. I had the great pleasure of working >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the journey like in 2001 to 2007? It was slow as you are pointing out, but were you still getting customers? What was the sustaining strategy during that period?

Philippe d’Offay: At that time in healthcare, the consolidation hadn’t quite begun. There was this very strong entrepreneurial spirit in healthcare. We were going after the single doctors. That’s all we really could handle. At the same time though, I would say it was really lucky. We got a lead for a very large hospital system. That hospital system represented 500 different licenses. We got that business pretty early on.

We started seeing some growth because of that. The problem though is >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $12 Million: Square Root CEO Chris Taylor (Part 1)

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

You know that we believe in the Bootstrapping Using Services methodology quite firmly. Here’s yet another story of how and why it works.

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?

Chris Taylor: I grew up in rural West Virginia. You won’t meet a lot of entrepreneurs out of West Virginia. When I was four, my father passed away, so my brother and I were raised by our mother. She did a fantastic job. My brother is also another entrepreneur. In college, I went to Carnegie-Mellon and studied Computer Science, Psychology, and Mathematics. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 1)

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

Ups and downs, successes and failures, experiments and pivots – the stuff that make up a serial entrepreneur’s journey.

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?

David Stubenvoll: I was born and raised in Levittown, New York. Levittown has the great distinction of being one of the first mass-produced communities. I’m the youngest of four. My brothers and sisters were quite a bit older than I was. My dad was a World War 2 veteran and bought his four-room house on the GI Bill. Since then, they’ve expanded that. I’ve lived there with my family and my grandmother until I went to college. I was the only one in my family to go to college.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go to college? >>>