Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To underscore what you said about joining the software industry in a business development role, it’s a common path for non-technical people. What you’re describing is a very good example of how entrepreneurs with non-technical backgrounds make their way to technology entrepreneurship.

Jeff Solomon: Yes. I learned a lot about how it all worked and what didn’t work. I resonated with the tech team that was there. I was interested. I decided to start a tech company. I decided to start with five friends which I do not recommend. We had six co-founders which is too many. A couple of them I went to high school with. A couple of them I went to college with.

Sramana Mitra: The year was?

Jeff Solomon: Early 1999. We did have one guy that was a stellar programmer. He was a friend of a friend. The bottom line is that we built some cool tech and had no business model. I didn’t know how important it was to solve a real problem that some customer segment had that would ultimately pay for it.

Sramana Mitra: Our philosophy is,

Do not write a single line of code until you have a full business strategy validated.

Jeff Solomon: Right. I teach entrepreneurship at a high school in LA. The entire class is about customer development. It’s about identifying a real problem and then figuring out what a product or service would be to solve that problem. I learned that the hard way.

Sramana Mitra: How many years did you spend doing this thing?

Jeff Solomon: It was a year. We raised about $300,000. We had some cool products. The internet was crashing and we couldn’t raise money. We certainly were not making money. It was a tough situation for the six co-founders. We ended up shutting that down. It was a great learning experience. I learned a lot about tech just working side by side in a product capacity.

It was the first time I had done a product management role. I had a great engineer and a great UI designer. I was defining what we were building. I wasn’t necessarily defining the right thing, but I was defining product and learning how to communicate with an engineering team to make something come to life. When that company went down, I was depressed for a few months. I didn’t know what to do. I started a little software consulting firm.

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing the programming?

Jeff Solomon: I had a bunch of scrappy guys. We were working at night in my living room. I got really good at listening to a business person who had no technical prowess explain to me where their problems were and defining a tool to address that. We made good money. We were peaking at $5 million in revenue on that.

Sramana Mitra: How many years?

Jeff Solomon: Three and half years. It was all services business. I liked it and we made some things that really improved people’s businesses. I sold that company to a guy who I brought in. They do $18 million in sales now.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon
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