Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What go-to-market strategy are you following? Is it a SaaS product that you go to market with?

Sameer Maggon: SearchStax, at a high level, is a search company. We offer Search-as-a-Service. It’s a SaaS/PaaS offering that is provided for mid-market to large enterprises on a subscription basis. 

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a SaaS product.

Sameer Maggon: Yes. We have a variety of channels. Customers can come to our website, swipe a credit card, and start using it on a pay-as-you-go basis. Majority of our customers are long-term customers.

Sramana Mitra: You bootstrapped the company, right?

Sameer Maggon: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It’s still bootstrapped.

Sameer Maggon: No money so far. It’s completely bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning. Help me trace the entrepreneur journey of how you got the product done. How did you finance the product-building process? How did you get to your first customers?

Sameer Maggon: Since I had the expertise around search, I was able to market and sell that service. I worked with a variety of customers who saw the need for my services. That’s how the initial revenue started to flow into the business. As I was building those relationships and consulting dollars, I had a couple of developers who were working on prototyping as well as building out the MVP of some of the stuff that I wanted to do. That’s how I funded the early stages of the product.

Fortunately, there was more need for the consulting work that I was doing. The clients I was working with wanted me to do more of what I was doing. I actually went ahead and started building a team of professional services folks who would provide services to the same customers I was providing services to. That helped further bring in more revenue into the business and utilizing the profits of the organization and fund that into the product development further.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a technique that we use a lot. We call it bootstrapping using services. We are very big believers in building product companies by bootstrapping with services.

Sameer Maggon: That’s pretty much what we did. While I was doing consulting, I would go and mind my own LinkedIn network. Anyone I knew, I would try to get in front of them and would try to show them what I was trying to do on the product side. I would show them the concept. I would go to the same people that I was consulting with. That’s how I got my first client. While I was providing services, I showed them the value of the offering I had. They said, “Where’s the contract?”

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean your first customers were your consulting enterprise clients? 

Sameer Maggon: Correct. They were all enterprise clients. I would say all of these companies were not giant organizations; they were enterprises in the range of $100 million to a billion in revenue. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the functionality of your MVP?

Sameer Maggon: The first product that I was able to get people to buy was around search analytics. Think about a company that has a lot of content. The easiest one is e-commerce because people understand it. As we go to the other extreme, think about companies that are more on the vertical search side of things. When people are coming to their website and search for something, how does a business person know what people are able to find and what people are not able to find when they come to your site.

That was the core functionality of the first offering. It was a software analytics tool that allowed the technology teams to understand what people are searching for. What are they finding? What kind of conversion rate am I getting when they try to search for something? That was primarily the first product.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million Using Services: Sameer Maggon, CEO of SearchStax
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