Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This was 150 users through that credit union customer?

Paroon Chadha: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You had one anchor customer and you had a software that was receiving feedback from the beginning.

Paroon Chadha: Chris was writing code, and I was out selling. We didn’t fear anything at that time. I wish I could be like that again. We really went in and looked for funding and customers. Our finance professor was the Chairman of the Purdue Federal >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 2)

Paroon Chadha: You are never going to be surrounded by so many super smart and super open people in your life. When you’re at school, there are a lot of engineers and computer scientists. There are a lot of people who are good at math. You can pretty much come up with any idea and if you try hard enough, you can find two or three people who will start meeting around that idea.

Forming a company is a real possibility. I realized that going into school and I really started to look for a good way to do this. My co-founder Christopher Beltran was an undergraduate. We were part of an e-commerce club. In 1999, Yahoo! and eBay were the two hot companies. Yahoo! was a portal company in the consumer space and eBay was an auction engine.

>>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 1)

Paroon has bootstrapped Passageways from Indiana and wants to help other Indiana entrepreneurs succeed.

Along the way, he has pivoted from licensed software to cloud software, and made other strategic decision that helped his company become more successful.

Read on to learn more on his moves.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journeys. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? >>>

Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you exactly what happened in your case. You did a Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later strategy. You were going out to raise Series A with $2 million in revenue. You went out to raise Series B with close to $10 million in revenue. These are funding situations where a company that is not in the location of the investors is not a problem at all.

If you were trying to raise money with $100,000 worth of revenue, it would have been a very different experience for you. Even if you’re in Silicon Valley, people are looking for more and more validation to raise funding. This is a story that comes over and over again. If you can do Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later with serious proof points, funding is a much easier game. >>>

Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me double-click down a little bit on the team issue. You have built this company from North Carolina?

John Stewart: Yes, from the ground up.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what is the consideration of your company today. What has worked and not worked in building this company from North Carolina? How is the company architected organizationally today? >>>

Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

John Stewart: It’s based on per user per month.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average deal size when you’re selling to one of your clients?

John Stewart: It varies by segment. We have as little as a single license at a non-profit to as many as thousands at a global 50 brand. It’s everything in between. >>>

Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a specific channel through which you were acquiring customers? Where were you getting the leads from?

John Stewart: We built relationships at the ground level at Salesforce. As they were selling deals, especially in the small business segment, they needed integrators who were willing to take those deals and roll out Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: Between the time when you started putting out these four apps on the App Exchange and when you actually identified that MapAnything is the one that is starting to resonate with customers, what was the time window? >>>

Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why build on top of Salesforce?

John Stewart: We had built our MRP system on top of it when I had the manufacturing company. Salesforce’s ecosystem was really starting to explode. It was everywhere. I knew how to build a services business very well. It seemed to be that it was less specialized than the hardcore engineering services we were doing, which very much fluctuated with the state of the economy versus something like Salesforce, which is constantly in demand.

We went out and specialized in doing SI services for small manufacturers. We were just doing project work. In mid-2011, one of >>>