Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All this is developed by Eric and your Vietnamese developer?

Mary Oemig: We now have a much bigger team. The original was developed by someone who left. We couldn’t continue to pay him and has come back. Eric and Zach were our early developers. We now have about five US-based engineers with one in Indiana, one in Wyoming, and the rest in Seattle.

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is a membership fee?

From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did Cielo find you?

Othamar Filho: Three years before, they had a scout go to Brazil and to many other Latin American countries to talk to RPO companies there. I had an RPO company in Brazil. That person was at Cielo. When I had the solution ready, I showed it to him. He presented that solution to the CEO.

Sramana Mitra: Before you raised money, what was the deal size that Cielo had put together with you to use your product?

From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho (Part 1)

Brazilian entrepreneur Othamar Filho identified an HRTech problem to solve while building a business in Brazil.

Read how he navigated his way to building a successful company in the US.

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

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 2)

Mary Oemig: We did what I would recommend to every single entrepreneur – a lot of listening tours. We talked to our future customers. We talked to teachers. We learned that teachers were trying to hire developers around the world to turn what they knew into games. They were losing a lot of money doing it, because they didn’t know how to manage developers.

We realized in the end that what we should develop is a creation platform with a student play platform based on best-in-breed knowledge about what you need to know about student performance in order to inform good next decisions about what to teach next. We trust that teachers know what content needs to be taught.

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 1)

Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story!

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?

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership?

Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to understand what matters to them. When you’re scoping, what workloads are important for them? How are their customers buying? It’s those questions that you want to answer strategically.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian?

Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second.

Sramana Mitra: This is a crowded space. What was so special about HYCU?

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the sales side. How did you leverage the Citrix channel to reach the customer base?

Simon Taylor: I was in my late 20s. I flew to Fort Lauderdale where the Citrix headquarters was. I walked in and just said I wanted to talk to the Alliances team. I was introduced to Vicky Pomarico who was an Alliance Marketing at Citrix. She said, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your company does.” She spent about an hour with me. I said, “I just want to learn how we can be the best possible partner for you. What are the things that partners do that light you up?”