Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 1)

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

Matt has built a fan business using content marketing to sell travel experiences to a millennial demographic. Very cool!

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

Matt Wilson: I grew up in upstate New York. I grew up in a little tiny town called Stormville New York. It’s about 60 minutes outside of New York. It’s not really that close to the city where there was much happening yet. It wasn’t extremely rural. I just started being an enterprising young man whether it was mowing lawns or picking golf balls out of the local ponds. Selling them on eBay was my first online business. That really ignited the >>>

Bootstrapping with Services from Michigan: Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the team in Detroit?

Amjad Hussain: Our total team size, including engineering, data science, and implementations, is a little over 50 people. We do not have any subcontracting or offshoring going on. Since we live in a very competitive and global landscape, we have to work in a very efficient manner. We have found several recipes of how to work together effectively so that we can compete globally.

Sramana Mitra: I have a couple of questions on that. How many customers do you have today?

Amjad Hussain: Because we go deep and wide and have these very long-term customer relationships, total number of customers is not a big list. We have around 20. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services from Michigan: Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At the very beginning, when you got this customer, what did you do for them? What did you propose to them that you were going to do that got you that customer?

Amjad Hussain: They had a need for a very specific warehouse management application for complex product categories that had a lot of SKUs and a lot of seasonal demand. We had tremendous knowledge not only of that domain but how to forecast demand at an in-store, item location level, and how to do smart replenishment and many other associated functions.

I think it was a combination of very strong technical and B2B domain knowledge and that some of the people in this first client company knew of our >>>

Bootstrapping with Services from Michigan: Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You came to Michigan straightaway?

Amjad Hussain: Yes, just because of where I landed my first job. I came to Detroit and I have lived here for 23 years. This is the longest that I have lived in any given place.

Sramana Mitra: What job did you come with?

Amjad Hussain: Since all of my training was in artificial intelligence, the very first thing that I did was I worked for a small engineering firm. They had some challenges and projects where my skills were relevant. I worked for a few employers. I eventually became the CIO of a company. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services from Michigan: Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai (Part 1)

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

I am always thrilled to see great entrepreneurship in various parts of the world that are off-center. Well, here’s a great one from Detroit.

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?

Amjad Hussain: I was born in a very small village of Pakistan.

Sramana Mitra: Where in Pakistan?

Amjad Hussain: A town about a hundred km south of Lahore. >>>

Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Texas

A view of 6th Street in Austin during SXSW.
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We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic, Florida, Illinois, Arizona.

Today, we will look at the entrepreneurship eco-system in Texas.

Among our earliest Entrepreneur Journeys stories was that of Manoj Saxena and Webify that IBM acquired back in 2006. The presence of IBM and many other tech firms gives the eco-system a vibrant rhythm. Startup activity is huge in Austin, especially, and exits are not difficult to find.

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How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the work force?

Sanjay Jupudi: We just touched 250 people.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers are you servicing?

Sanjay Jupudi: About 30 customers. The good part of what we have done is when we go to customers, we are doing a lot of work for customers instead of just touching the surface.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. Landing a customer and growing the customer is a good way to build a business. I think it’s good 

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How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about this process of brainstorming about what you were going to focus on in the next company. What was the process with coming up with where you were going to place your bet?

Sanjay Jupudi: There was a quality assurance company that was hiring people to test applications. If you need testing services, I have 10 people and they’ll manually write all the test cases. When Agile started, a lot of clients were saying, “Testing function is slowing us down. Our people are developing code and then we have to wait three weeks for the testing to be complete.”

What they did was they wrote code to test code. Once the user story is developed, all the testers get together and they start testing in the waterfall way. After that, the code goes into production. You’re losing time and there’s a lot of frustration. It’s an inefficient process. There is potential to release faster >>>