Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 3)

Mack Sundaram: Exactly. There’s always that human psychology element that tells you, “Maybe you’re not ready. Maybe you should wait another year.” That was one side of the brain holding me back. At the same time, since I’d already tasted being in a startup situation a decade before that, the lure of that novelty was too much. I had to do it. As I was working in a corporate job, I had to do this on the side.

I did two or three more startups. They were fairly good. They were in education. Think about it as social networking for education. Right around that time, Facebook was becoming very famous. But then, we were using social networking to learn more effectively. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I did a startup in AI 20 years ago. That was not when AI was really happening.

Mack Sundaram: There you go. It was incredible to get that opportunity. It was a great experience for me.

Sramana Mitra: You left the company, though?

Mack Sundaram: We sold the system to the Department of Defense. I went on to do my own startup using my own money. I went on to another startup, which failed miserably because I didn’t get certain things right. That was a very hard lesson to learn. As a graduate student and immigrant, I wasn’t doing well financially. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 1)

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Mack has built a successful business optimized for autonomy and profitability. Excellent navigation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Tell us where you’re from. Where did you grow up? Where were you born and raised?

Mack Sundaram: I was born in South India in a village near Chennai. I spent some time of my childhood in Chennai and Pondicherry. I later went to school in New Delhi. Since then, I moved over to the United States where I got an opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree in Economics. That’s where the transition happened. >>>

Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Is this an inside sales model? What is the go-to market?

Anthony Ferry: It has turned out to be more of an inside sales type of selling. It’ a hybrid. That was a learning for me. What I was used to was more of an outside sales in a consultative arena. Especially when your product is people, you need to be in front of that customer proving yourself and presenting that talent to them in person.

With PriceSpider, that was a drastic shift. The majority of our identification of potential customers through marketing, solicitation, qualifying, and even initial presentations is all done over the phone. It is only the larger customers or the very >>>

Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing from a business-building point of view. You have about 500 companies that are using the Where To Buy solution. All these other products that you have come up with, to what extent are these products up-sells into those customers bases?

Anthony Ferry: Every single one of them. As we explore new opportunities or things we want to build, we realize how important it is for that thing to be something that you can market with your existing Sales and Marketing team and that you can sell to your existing customer base.

If I have an opportunity to develop a new product, but it’s something that is such a departure from what we are doing that my >>>

Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 5)

Anthony Ferry: The veer off to the B2C was because we saw an opportunity where there were a lot of solutions, and we thought that we had better data. It also was a much larger market if we were to succeed. You’re talking about your customers being monetized in a grander scale having millions of users. We were very enamored by that grandiose potential of a B2C solution.

We pursued that for a few years but we became aware of how daunting and challenging that really can be to tackle and to compete in that space unless you’re very well-funded. We were organically funded. We had not taken outside money. It was >>>

Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The technology you got from Jon was a separate company and not part of Neudesic?

Anthony Ferry: That is currently a separate company. That’s the company that I’m currently the CEO of. It was formed upon the acquisition of that technology. He had built a very ingenious crawling engine for data acquisition across the web, specifically targeted towards retails products being offered for sale on the web.

We brought that in-house and incubated that for a few years. We brought to market a series of reports to manufacturers to help them understand their pricing presence in the marketplace. We produced numerous other types of reports on the data that we >>>

Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any specific type of clients that you were getting traction with?

Anthony Ferry: Finance and banking companies were a big one. Hospitality was another big one. We built some pretty elaborate hospitality systems for hotels, gaming, and things of that nature. It was fairly diverse. We were getting a lot of ideas.

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you start working on a product?

Anthony Ferry: We were working for a finance institution and they had a need for a middleware solution to connect to >>>