Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re avid users of Upwork. We really believe in that whole virtual staffing model.

Josh Kamrath: For a big and long part of our history, we used Upwork to get the first iteration of our products to market. We found some developers in Ukraine. We did a bake-off. I had three different teams do the same project and picked the best team to become our core developers and those guys took us very far away with our products.

They did the first two iterations over the course of three and a half years. So that was our development team. Jeff was in product managing and I was coming up with new features, and the offshore developers were building those features. I went out and sold the product.

Sramana Mitra: What was in the functionality when you started?

Josh Kamrath: At that point, it was having a student do a recording of their presentation and then upload a PowerPoint deck. So there were slides that were synced up with that presentation and then basic text-based feedback workflows.

It allowed other students to watch each other’s presentations or the teacher to watch the presentations and provide text-based feedback accordingly.

Sramana Mitra: To whom were you selling this?

Josh Kamrath: Mostly door-to-door and to individual faculty. 

Sramana Mitra: So the faculty were buying it and not the university or the institution?

Josh Kamrath: The faculty would require the students to purchase it as if it were a textbook. But the decision maker, if you will, was a faculty member. The users were students.

Sramana Mitra: What would an average deal size look like if the faculty was the decision maker and the university was the buyer? What was the business model? What’s the average pricing?

Josh Kamrath: The business model was consumption-based. So it was selling individual sheets to students. Again, it was the faculty that was making the students buy the sheets as if they were textbooks. Typically, the price point was $25 per semester per student. The deal sizes ranged from $3,000 to $25,000 per transaction.

Sramana Mitra: As you were building up these early sales, did you notice anything in terms of segmentation? Were you getting traction or no traction in one segment or another? 

Josh Kamrath: Definitely for specific disciplines such as public speaking, business communication, entrepreneurship, marketing, business-oriented courses, and health science courses. It’s almost logical that the degrees or programs that typically would have more face-to-face interaction in the workplace typically had a curriculum that was more conducive to what we were trying to do.

Now it’s all over the map but for the most part, it was predominantly business courses, humanities, public speaking, health sciences, and foreign languages. Foreign languages or language, in general, is a big discipline with English as a second language, sign language, Spanish, French, or Portuguese.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath
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