Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: So, Bazari contacted the top 15 microfinance institutions in India and met with 13 of the 15 to offer them their online loan reporting platform.

[Bazari offers SMS interface to manage reporting and tracking of lending and collection of the micro-borrowers accounts.]

Two of the 13 were already building their own solutions, but 11 of the 13 said if Bazari would come up with a solution, they would go with it.

So, Bazari pivoted to that model and that caught real fire and interest. They were offered $1.2 million in funding when they only wanted to raise about $300,000. I think they ended up taking $400,000. Currently, all of their management team is in India making it go.

You might know that in about January and February 2011, in India and one other nation, the governments of those countries politically decided to tell all those borrowers not to pay back the micro finance institutions on the loans.

There had been some suicides from the borrowers. The suicides did not exceed the normal suicide rate, but somebody used that as a newsworthy political item. So, for about a month or two, the micro finance industry in India was in a tailspin. It went through a dark period for about 60 days.

That threw Bazari for a real loop. The interesting thing is when the political storm eased up, it showed the micro finance institutions, more than ever, they need better infrastructures and systems, and they need this platform more than ever. It ended up being a big boost to Bazari, and Bazari recently signed a very big customer. That’s an interesting company.

Another one of our companies is Icount. I actually didn’t like it at first or understand. I didn’t vote for them to come into the program, but I got outvoted by other people.

Over time, I started getting what they’re doing. Other people saw the vision earlier than I did. Icount saw an opportunity to be a place where politicians and municipalities could get in touch with the voters and get their opinions in a very interesting way.

So, Icount launched and got funded pretty quickly. Their first customer ended up being a small city here in Utah named Herriman that was having a political brouhaha over a bridge project.

Four or five people wanted to build this expensive bridge to replace another bridge.  They were coming to all the city council meetings, and it was going to cost the city a lot of money.

The city was about to do it, and then Icount called them and said, “Hey, would you like to be able to know what all of your citizens think of this, because they’ll have to pay the taxes to pay for the bridge?”

So, the city employed Icount, sent out one mailer to their citizens and 5% –which is a very deep penetration – registered at Icount and gave their opinions. They found out that 97% don’t want to have the tax and build the new bridge.

So, this vocal minority was influencing the city council, unduly so, because no one else was showing up to the city council meetings.

The city manager for Herriman loves Icount and now goes around to their investor presentations.

They’ve now signed up some 20 citites. If they go around the country and sign up all these municipalities and get all these registered voters on their system, it’s going to be something really special.

We have another company, called TaleSpring. They do interactive books for children for the iPad, iPhone, and Android-based devices. Their first book launched just recently, and it hit the top 50 in iTunes.

TaleSpring raised about two-thirds of their funds – the amount they wanted to raise – but they didn’t raise it all, so they gave all the checks back, and they’ve been bootstrapping.

Some of our companies are bootstrapping because they can’t raise money. TaleSpring was offered money, and they returned the checks uncashed because they didn’t get to the number they wanted. They chose to bootstrap longer.

The other ones, I think, would take money if it were offered to them. But a couple of them just don’t have a strong enough management team or something was not clicking and they’re not raising the money they want to.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah
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