From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the customers are in the $10,000 range?

Julien Salinas: Among our paid customers, it’s 10%. Maybe a bit less.

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is what you call major account customers?

Julien Salinas: I don’t have the exact number today, but I think it’s something like 150 to 200 like SAP and Lufthansa.

Sramana Mitra: All the lead generation seems to be happening on your blog.

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are all developers?

Julien Salinas: Less and less, but still most of them.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a specific genre of developers? Are they developing a particular platform?

Julien Salinas: Initially, it was mainly machine learning engineers that use Python. All the machine learning engineers are Python developers. They taught me a lot of things. Then gradually, I started moving to a more global developer market. Today, I have developers who are developing on any platform and language.

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 1)

Numerous developers around the world are turning into successful entrepreneurs. Julien provides a textbook case study of a brilliant journey that is a highly repeatable blueprint to follow.

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?

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a B2C business?

Victor Allis: Yes, it’s for voters. The strange thing is, there’s no revenue. There is no business model at the time. All we’re trying to do is to get people to use it to vote. I always believe that if you do something that adds value, there’s always a way to get people to invest in it or pay money. We have a lot of policy questions. People make choices based on it. We can take all these choices and add them up and we could predict that a candidate would win. Our poll was actually closer than most polls.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You took money from private equity that gave you some liquidity to the founders and gave you growth capital to move to the next phase.

Victor Allis: Only liquidity to the founders. This is what was happening. I moved to the United States in 2010. We did a bit of press release. Suddenly, everybody was knocking on my door offering us money. I said no. They said, “That’s exactly why we want to give it to you.”

Sramana Mitra: I have a saying that VCs love to come to the rescue of victory.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you get to?

Victor Allis: Ultimately in 2014, we had $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: What are the inflection points? You remember the milestones really well.

Victor Allis: The first one was in December 2000. The Dutch Railways was looking for a solution. It wasn’t part of my scope. My scope was manufacturing and trucking companies. We had never thought about Railways.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of companies were these seven companies that you invited? Were they logistics companies?

Victor Allis: One was in the Rotterdam harbor; they unloaded ships. They told us that it’s a unique process and there was no product that could handle that. Then there was another one. It was a copper factory. We said that our product is so flexible that, no matter how crazy your process is, it will fit in our software. That was true. That was the unique thing. We made very flexible software.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is a track that we have called bootstrapping using services. It’s a tried-and-true path in which a lot of entrepreneurs have built companies. We have great regard for this method.

The services work, I understand. The product that you were developing, what was going to be in that product? How well did you understand the product, the requirements, and the positioning? What problem were you going to solve? How well did you understand all that?