Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So the company was registered in London but you were still operating out of Greece?

Demitri Memos: Right. Ironically, the decision at that point was to register a company in London for stability and better access to the markets. Next year, my partner will be moving to the UK. He’s leading the sales team in the UK where we have an office. This was a very abrupt and interesting change in my life as you can imagine. Marine Traffic had immense potential for growth. It had already gained traction as a free service. The challenge was to convert that traffic to monetized services. We worked pretty hard on that. At the same time, I was learning and trying to build the company. Building the product and the company at the same time with no prior experience in either SaaS or this sized endeavours was a real challenge and still is. We’re still learning everyday. >>>

Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 1)

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

Europe is imploding. Entrepreneurs are its only hope. Daniel Nathan is building a really cool company based in Paris.

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?

Daniel Nathan: I was born very close to Paris. I was born in 1988. My parents were not entrepreneurs, but I always wanted to create my own business. I started my first company when I was pretty young. Our city was not such a great city to live in. To go to Paris, you had to take a train. It was pretty dangerous to take that train. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this for a green shipping company or an idea that you came up with yourself?

Demitri Memos: Our third partner had already started that.

Sramana Mitra: How did he get plugged to you guys then?

Demitri Memos: He was introduced by a mutual friend. He had built this website on his own in his basement. At the same time, he was teaching at a university here in Greece. What he did was he created a map, and he offered the map to anyone with ship position data and who could connect to the service to send the data. The data was displayed on the map as a mash-up. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the e-learning business that you were trying to raise money for? Who were the customers? What kind of e-learning are we talking about?

Demitri Memos: It was corporate e-learning. The idea was that we were to provide a platform with some content.

Sramana Mitra: This was going to be for Greek customers? What customer base were you designing this for?

Demitri Memos: We weren’t that wise. We focused on the Greek market. We thought of raising money in Greece for the Greek market. We failed to raise capital as access to capital in Greece was terrible at that time. It’s a bit better now but it’s still not easy to get money. We failed with that. The recession started to hit. There wasn’t really any corporate customer in Greece that was interested in developing their personnel. That was the end of our e-learning journey. We ended up with nothing. Our next stop was social games. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2014?

Joe Kinsella: We don’t disclose our revenue numbers.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you close in 2014?

Joe Kinsella: We went from nine customers in 2013 to around 60 in 2014. It grew to 300 in 2015 and we’re 600 plus now.

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model?

Joe Kinsella: It’s a percentage of spend. Companies consume cloud infrastructure. We needed some way to approximate the complexity of what we do for >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, you had a bunch of customers. You had validation. Did your venture fund write you a check?

Joe Kinsella: They did not. Along the way, I had a series of advisors. I had six advisors. The goal there was to really find people who complemented my skills. I had just two questions I wanted to ask them. One is, “Should I continue bootstrapping this business or should I raise money? If I should raise money, will it be a seed round or an A round?” The second one is, “Do I hire a CEO?” It was a great discussion.

The net result was to go straight for an A round and hire a CEO. Before I raised the A round, I figured I’ll bring the CEO on board. Dan was CEO at Silverback. I sat down with Dan and reviewed everything together. He looked at me and said, “Why am I not your CEO?” At that time, Dan had been building out the Entrepreneur Center over at UMass Boston. I knew from earlier that he had been thinking about doing a startup at some point in the future. The timing just aligned. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 1)

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

The morning that Brexit sent shockwaves through the world economy, I spoke with Demitris Memos who is building a nicely scaling, bootstrapped SaaS company from Athens, Greece. It was thrilling to hear a story of success and hope against the larger backdrop of doom and gloom.

Greece and Europe need more of them.

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

Demitri Memos: I’m from Greece.

Sramana Mitra: You grew up in Greece? >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you backtrack for me for a second and answer a couple of questions before we get to this point? I have a bit of a gap in the process here. You said you were running a bunch of experiments and one of them turned into this situation. How many such experiments around different product hypothesis did you run?

Joe Kinsella: It wasn’t product hypothesis. I knew the business I was starting was management of cloud infrastructure in some way, shape, or form. It was taking different hypotheses where the market could go in different directions in trying to understand how people were thinking about this problem. I ran, at least, six experiments.

Sramana Mitra: You were going to do something in cloud infrastructure management and you were just trying to find the angle through which to get in. >>>