Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you highlight what was different in the commercial product versus the open source product? From a product positioning point of view, why would somebody who was interested in the open source product buy this one?

Mikko Valimaki: I would say there are three reasons. Some of our biggest customers were very hesitant to use open source. When we said that this software is no longer open source, there was more demand for it from big companies who didn’t actually want to share all the source code of their own product. We didn’t know about this kind of stuff. Then of course, we started to develop all the new features. It was technically much better. Open source development was typically for the generic PC users. The requirements coming from these companies doing embedded devices was very different. We didn’t know about that, and we started to work directly with them. We started to build new features which were very good for the customer base.

Sramana Mitra: What was the mechanism through which they were finding you? You started generating demand from big companies, how were big companies finding out about your existence? You were doing this out of Helsinki. How did the customer community become aware of your existence and your offering?

Mikko Valimaki: At the beginning, it was through the open source project. In 2009, we actually got into the headlines of several relevant news sites because of the IP from Windows. Some of these websites covered us. I interviewed with those guys.

I also started to travel to the US to meet with people. I also started to go to Asia, which turned out to be our main market and basically started talking with the companies there. Initially when everything started, it was the open source project and our website that was the main communication medium. Then it turned into a more traditional B2B marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Why was Asia adopting your technology aggressively? What was so special about what you were doing that appealed to the Asian market?

Mikko Valimaki: Now we’re talking about events in the summer of 2009 and after that. At that point, we figured out that there are two main markets that we could work with—the data centre or server market and the consumer electronic device market. We decided to focus on the device market.

It turns out that most of the device manufacturers are located in Asia. They are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera
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