Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DudaMobile CEO Itai Sadan (Part 2)

Sramana: How long did you work for SAP?

Itai Sadan: I worked for them for six years. During that time I was relocated to Palo Alto, where I spent most of my time. Even within a large company like SAP, I found a way to build my own little startup environment. I have always felt entrepreneurial and have had a million different ideas for things that I would want to do to improve the world with software.

During my time at SAP, I was able to get senior management to buy into an idea I had for a new product. I was able to put a team together and develop the concept into a product that was sold to 3,000 different customers.

Sramana: What was that product?

Itai Sadan: It was the SAP Discovery System. I noticed that a lot of our biggest customers were wasting time on hardware sourcing and SAP implementation. They spent very little time proving the ROI. I came out with the idea of doing SAP in a box. The idea was to have an SAP environment where you could just plug it in and it worked. I was able to get a lot of different teams at SAP to contribute their product into the server we built.

Our solution consisted of both hardware and software. We implemented a lot of different SAP products into this one server and had everything pre-installed. Customer just loved this product because everything was pre-configured.

Sramana: Did you do that project as an intrapreneurship project?

Itai Sadan: Yes. I did that from 2004 to 2010 within SAP.

Sramana: What happened in 2010?

Itai Sadan: I have always had an itch to do something of my own. I had a lot of different business ideas during the years, but I was always able to shoot them down myself. One day in 2008, I stumbled upon an Apple store and picked up an iPhone for the first time in my life. I was amazed. It then dawned on me that the entire Internet was moving to this smaller-sized device. I realized that Amazon and other sites created dedicated websites to capture mobile users. Those sites were a lot different from desktop sites.

I went out and tried to browse to local small business websites, and I found that their sites looked awful. That problem still exists today. A lot of local businesses do not have the time, budget, or skill sets to build sites optimized for mobile users. However, users are going mobile all the time. Businesses that we cater to are getting 20% or 30% of their website traffic via mobile devices. I think Facebook sees 50% of their revenue from mobile devices.

In 2008 my goal was to find a way to help small businesses connect and engage with their customers via mobile sites. That was the genesis of DudaMobile.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DudaMobile CEO Itai Sadan
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