Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 4)

Christian Gheorghe: Revolutions do not just happen within an institution. They are always due to outside influence because people demand better experiences with involvement, empowerment, and engagement. The same thing is seen in the enterprise space right now. In the past, you’d always go to IT for a better report, a different report or cube, which is no longer feasible. People at the edge of the organization are demanding experiences that are self-reliant, easy to use, and that do not require the same level of reliance on IT.  With this, they can get empowered to participate on the overall performance of the business.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s understand Tidemark better. I think the best way for us to understand Tidemark would be through your customers. What is your target customer segment and then explain to us how you’re delivering value in Tidemark.

Christian Gheorghe: One of the main challenges our customers are trying to solve is business transformation. Sometimes by their own volition, competition, or the market environment, they are forced to transform their businesses. Now, what does that mean? The metrics by which they used to run their businesses no longer apply. They are changing because there is a greater degree of requirement to look at how the business is doing and plan and model the business on a much higher frequency. For example, moving from doing a revenue plan once a year to achieving revenue targets monthly by trying to understand the profitability.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 2)

Christian Gheorghe: We’re seeing a transformation towards a much more volatile type of risk environment where there’s more global competition and where the user base is changing significantly to a prosumer market – where consumer experience is demanded at work. Furthermore, the mobile platform is starting to have a big impact on the enterprise space. With respect to these trends of user communities and cloud and mobile platforms, we need to answer how companies can manage their businesses in terms of performance, financial analysis, planning, and predictive analytics.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 1)

This discussion focuses on the evolution of analytics in the cloud era. Christian Gheorghe is a serial entrepreneur and a domain expert in the analytics field.

Sramana Mitra: Christian, introduce our audience to you as well as to Tidemark.

Christian Gheorghe: My name is Christian Gheorghe. I’m the founder and CEO of a company started four years ago that’s called Tidemark.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Christian Gheorghe: We are located in Redwood Shores in California.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? You have an accent, so I’m thinking you’re not from Redwood Shores.

>>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 7)

Sramana: Can you talk, Christophe, about what has been your strategy in terms of building the team? You started with four co-founders and sounds like Julien came on board about a year later. Who else is on the team now, how big is the team and what has been your philosophy in building the team out?

Christophe: We have no choice but making the right choice the first time. We have a hiring process that is very precise and very strict, because we cannot make a mistake. For example, very early on we recognized that scalability will be critical for the business. What we did early on was hire Guillaume Plessis as a consultant to help us in scaling our infrastructure on AWS. He worked for us as a consultant for one year and knowing that he was really good, we asked him to join TextMe, a year later in early 2013, to become VP Infrastructure.

>>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 6)

Sramana: Talk about the execution side. You mentioned that the ad networks were not really setup to work with a telecom company in this mode. So which ad network were you able to work with to get this model going?

Julien: Christophe, you want to take that one?

Christophe: Yeah. I would not say that they were not happy to work with us. It’s just that they are not used to seeing companies like us.

>>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 5)

Sramana: Can you give me some idea about how the company ramped in terms of users beyond May 2012 when you brought to market the product with the more advanced functionality.

Christophe: We had 9 million downloads at the end of 2012. Today we have 20 million.

Sramana: That’s pretty fast. May 2012 to December 2013, 20 million – that’s good ramp. Can you talk about monetization? I understand that you already are a $10 million company. Tell me more about how did that happen?

Christophe: As a startup, before even creating the company, we had the business model in mind. We said: “Well, we need to give this for free and we need to make sure that the business model is working.” Very early on with my partner we consulted a lot of networks and potential partners to make sure that our business would be a real business from day one. The first day we launched the product, there was some advertisement.

>>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 4)

Sramana: After you launched the product in three months, what kind of ramp did you see in terms of adoption?

Christophe: That’s a long time ago. Julien, have you seen the historical figures lately?

Julien: Yeah, I did. If you talk about 2011, I want to say the numbers would look small for now. I would say the first two months, you are probably talking 15,000 to 20,000 new signups first month or so?

Christophe: It grew quite quickly to more than a 100,000 per month.

Sramana: What was the user count at the end of the 2011 for example?

>>>