How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 1)

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

AI will disrupt outsourcing services companies in a very big way. We talk to Sanjay on how he plans to prepare.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your personal journey. Tell me where you’re from, where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background. Since this is a co-founder story, it would be great if you could also bring a little bit of Prasanna’s story.

Sanjay Jupudi: I’m from India.

Sramana Mitra: What part of India? >>>

Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Arizona

We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic, Florida, Illinois.

Today, we will look at Arizona’s entrepreneurship eco-system.

What I love about Arizona’s eco-system is that the entrepreneurs have a strong tradition of bootstrapping.

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Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Illinois

The Economist recently did an article titled Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley. The positive message in the article is that entrepreneurship has now spread around the world. Compelling ventures are getting built everywhere.

Today, we put the spotlight on Illinois.

First, a look at the Unicorns.

We have to start with Groupon, one of the highest profile companies from the region. Lavishly hyped up, it has since fallen in esteem, but remains a presence in the Chicago scene. Read: From Unicorn to Unicorpse: How Groupon Fell From Grace. Well, it’s not quite an Unicorpse, and has been working on a turnaround in recent years.

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Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of the business is this one-time fee to buy the chart that you’re providing.

Nick Shaw: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What do the 26 coaches do then?

Nick Shaw: They do more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Sramana Mitra: There is a subscription business that is more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Nick Shaw: Yes. There are three tiers. The first tier is about $20 where you can buy our ebooks. You read it and you can do things >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you feel comfortable talking a bit about what it cost to get this kind of endorsement? How do you evaluate which influencer relationships should you take on versus not?

Nick Shaw: Something really important is making sure it’s a good match in terms of our brand. We’ve done some experiments. We’ve worked with some influencers that have a ton of followers. We just don’t get much in return. What we found was maybe their followers don’t match up with our brand. We have a lot of Ph.D.’s and registered dieticians.

A lot of times, some of these influencers’ followers demographics just don’t match up with that. We’ve seen that there’s not a lot of return in cases >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to customer acquisition. You said you have 85,000 people in your Facebook group. How did you get to these kinds of numbers?

Nick Shaw: Our number one strategy is social media. That was pretty evident early on. Being in the health and fitness industry, it’s very visual-oriented. People want specific results. They want to look a certain way. If you can get people results, people post and talk about how well the program works. We repost and spotlight on certain clients. People see that and it just takes off. It just snowballs and has an exponential growth.

We have almost 330,000 followers on our main Instagram account. Instagram is the perfect medium for what we do because >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’ve created more of a content business.

Nick Shaw: Yes. I would say we’re in the education business. We give people the education on what they need to eat, when, and how much.

Sramana Mitra: An online learning kind of program. What’s the form factor of how you distribute this?

Nick Shaw: Early on, it was all Excel files. We recently changed it to PDF format. It was originally all on email. We’ve since changed. Now it’s all downloadable right on our website. A person orders, and within a few minutes, they’re able to get their files. It’s right in their account.  >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn about how many clients could each coach service?

Nick Shaw: A lot of it depends on the coach. All of our coaches were either in school or professors. Currently, we have over 25 coaches – 20 of them have Ph.D.’s, seven are registered dieticians and one is a family physician. This isn’t necessarily their full-time job. How many clients they can take on varies a little bit. Some may want to keep it relatively small. A good rough number to cap it at is probably a hundred at any given time. That would be an outlier. The average is 40 to 50.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that is strategic in how you have scaled this business besides figuring out a reliable way to pair the customers with coaches who can then customize their training routine for this $100 to $150 per month price point?

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