Bootstrapping To 20 Million: Replicon Co-Founders Raj And Lakshmi Narayanaswamy (Part 2)

Sramana: What specifically was your intention with the company? What was the company going to do or produce?

Raj Narayanaswamy: We changed directions many times. We did a lot of trial and error. Our initial goal was to build a work flow application. We envisioned a general purpose platform where end users could build their own application quickly. We did not get that anywhere beyond a business plan and a functional prototype that we used in our efforts to try and raise money. We talked to a lot of different people and we were unsuccessful in raising money.

We then decided that instead of describing the problem we would just build an application. We built a Web-based application using some Netscape technology that we thought would be useful. We both had very technical backgrounds, so we developed the code very quickly. We followed Jeffrey Moore’s book, so we went looking for some visionaries to buy our solution and potentially help fund us to complete the product.

We worked with Netscape, and they started promoting us on their website. We started getting a lot of interest but we had zero revenue. We spent six months struggling through that and our savings were disappearing. Right before we started the business, we applied for a bunch of credit cards at the exact same time. We ended up using most of those cards and built up a balance of $90,000. We had an office and we did a lot of trade shows.

We were taking cash advances from one credit card to pay the balance on other cards. We were using all the tricks we could to get through. We realized what we were doing was not working, and we knew we had to start making some money, so we began doing consulting work. At that time we were filling our timesheets in order to get paid. Lakshmi recommended that we automate the timesheet process that we were doing for our consulting work because it was an annoying process.

Lakshmi Narayanaswamy: We spent the mornings doing our consulting work for other companies, and then at night we built our own product. Between working on our consulting projects and building our own products at night we did not have time to deal with timesheets, accounts, and collecting the cash. It was very painful for just us two, so we figured it would be even more so for larger organizations.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping To 20 Million: Replicon Co-Founders Raj And Lakshmi Narayanaswamy
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