Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax (Part 1)

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and in what kind of background?

Sameer Maggon: I grew up in Delhi. I did my engineering in Computer Science from Pune. Then I came back to my hometown to work for a document management company. Then I decided to learn more. I came to USC in Los Angeles and did my Masters in Computer Science. Since then, I’ve been in LA and worked in a variety of startups and larger companies in the greater Los Angeles area. 

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe are we talking about? When did you finish your Masters?

Sameer Maggon: 2005 was when I completed my Masters. 

Sramana Mitra: The kinds of jobs that you’ve been doing, were you developing products? What were the roles that you performed?

Sameer Maggon: For the first company, I was building software. They wanted to have a search capability. After my Masters, I worked for another search company funded by Clear Storm Venture Partners. I joined them as an engineer as well. Over a period of time, I went from software engineering to product lead, and then finally, to a little bit of product management. That company, in the 2008 timeframe, ran out of steam and was acquired by OpenText.

Then I went and joined AT&T, building their search platform. At that time, they were assembling a team to revamp their entire search platform. I joined them as a founding team member for the search team where I started as an engineer. After that, I joined Geodelic which was focused on mobile search. I was managing product for them for their local search.

After that, I decided that I wanted to start my own journey. I started a company called Productsy that was focused on building software products for entrepreneurs and launching those products in a fairly short period of time. I did that for about two years. What I realized was that search was near and dear to my heart. That’s when I founded SearchStax in 2013. I officially incorporated it in 2015. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of what you wanted to do with SearchStax? 

Sameer Maggon: I started as a consultant, selling my expertise to bigger companies and providing services around that. The main premise of starting SearchStax is that I felt people were trying to do the same stuff over and over again. Whenever I go to another search team, they would do the same work – assembling the infrastructure, building analytics, and reporting capability.

With the advancement of open source and cloud computing, I thought that people shouldn’t be doing this again and again. That’s what started me on this journey of creating SearchStax. The first product that we built was around search analytics and saying, “Not every company needs to build search analytics from scratch. There is an ability to offer analytics as a service for the search space.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax
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