Bootstrap an AI Startup First, Raise Money Later: Sean Minter, Founder CEO of AmplifAI (Part 1)

Sean has bootstrapped AmplifAI to $1M, and then raised over $15M in two rounds of financing. Read on to learn the nuances of his strategy and execution.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Sean, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Sean Minter: My background is Indian. My parents are from Indore and Bhopal in India. I’ve been in the US most of my life. I came here when I was three years old and was educated here.

But I have lots of family in Indore, Bhopal. From a company perspective, we have an office in Hyderabad and a couple in the US as well.

I’ve grown up here in the United States and moved around here a lot as well over the years.

Sramana Mitra: So, you’ve lived in different parts of the United States.

Sean Minter: I went to elementary school in Virginia, middle school in New Jersey, high school in Ohio, college in Ohio, and I’ve lived in Texas and Florida since then.

Sramana Mitra: You’re based in Texas now?

Sean Minter: Yes, I’m now based in Texas.

Sramana Mitra: Did you study engineering?

Sean Minter: Yes, I did. I have an engineering degree. While I was working at my first job, I got an MBA as well by going to school in the evenings.

Sramana Mitra: When does your entrepreneurial journey begin?

Sean Minter: It begins about four years after college. I spent four or five years working in the telecom industry at MCI and AT&T. I then started my entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Sean Minter: In 1996.

Sramana Mitra: So the beginning of the internet, roughly speaking.

Sean Minter: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What was the first company that you did?

Sean Minter: It’s probably 1997 when the journey began. There was a lot of change happening during that timeframe. The telecom business in the US was being deregulated. There weren’t monopolies in the local phone service business anymore. The long distance carrier business had been a competitive industry for a while. Coming from the long distance market, we were all focused on trying to get into the local service monopoly business. In developing those strategies while working at AT&T and MCI, I got an idea. I must have had the entrepreneurial bug. I figured out that if the long distance companies can do it, we can beat them to it because we can be faster.

Some of the folks from AT&T and I left and started our own competitive phone company. Selling local phone service, we were one of the first ones because that was monopoly until then. Once the market opened up, we were the first ones in the market selling it.

And that was a journey in itself because none of us had ever done sales before, right? And that becomes a challenge when you’ve never done sales.

Sramana Mitra: What part of the country were you doing this in?

Sean Minter: I was in Dallas.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing B to C?

Sean Minter: No, it was B to B. I’ve never been in the B to C business. Everything I’ve ever done was B to B.

Sramana Mitra: So it was B to B telecom. How did you finance this company?

Sean Minter: We financed it out of our own pockets. We didn’t raise any money. We bootstrapped it and built it up.

I’m on the Board of the University of Texas at Dallas in the Entrepreneur School. I teach and I always tell people that the number one thing you need to learn as an entrepreneur is how to do sales. Even if you’re a good programmer, it doesn’t make any difference. I can hire programmers, right?

The number one thing you can do is learn how to do sales. We learned that the hard way because none of us knew how to do sales. We thought it would be easy to start a company. When we tried to go sell to customers, nobody would ever buy from us.

Sramana Mitra: What changed? How did you convince customers to buy?

Sean Minter: It was with practice. We’d knock on doors, talk to people, learn why they were getting objections, and figure out how to overcome them. It would have been faster if we already knew how to do sales, but we didn’t. So we had to learn to become salespeople.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrap an AI Startup First, Raise Money Later: Sean Minter, Founder CEO of AmplifAI
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