Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga (Part 2)

Sramana: You said the three of you started as engineering students in Canada. Are you still based on Canada today?

Mamoon Rashid: We have a very strong presence in Canada and still live there, but we have our primary business in the U.S. now. However, it is a Canadian company.

Sramana: When the three of you started this company and decided to ride the telecom wave what was the financial situation around you? Did you bootstrap the company with your own savings?

Mamoon Rashid: That is exactly what we did. We used family and credit card funding to seed the conception of the company. That was a total of about $20,000, which covered our hardware and software licenses. From that point on we developed everything on our own.

Sramana: Who was your first customer?

Mamoon Rashid: Our first client was based in Cuba. It was an investment company that was Italy based with an office in Cuba. They leveraged our solution for inexpensive calling. We were low-hanging fruit at that time.

Sramana: How did they find you?

Mamoon Rashid: One of my colleagues has a Cuban background. He was on vacation there talking about this with one of his friends. He told him that it was a great opportunity for him to offer the service in Cuba, and his friend agreed. We did some exploration to see if we could use an off-the-shelf product to build our solution, but the funding was not there to buy everything we needed so we created the product ourselves. Once we had our solution ready, we notified our contact down in Cuba who then introduced it to his clients, and we were able to get them as our first customers.

Sramana: It is always interesting to learn how the first few customers are acquired. They are key for entrepreneurs, and it is important to have a good strategy to get them.

Siva Sanmuga: The key benefit that we had was that it cost companies five six dollars a minute to make calls from Cuba. Using our technology, we brought that cost down to two dollars a minute, and even then we had a huge markup. That made the value proposition very clear. Once we had our first few customers, we started advertising on Google. We were probably one of the first companies to advertise on Google.

Sramana: Did you try to recruit Cuban customers through Google?

Mamoon Rashid: By that time we had opened up to all international clients. Once we had our first few clients, which happened to be in Cuba, we started advertising online.

Sramana: What countries did you gain traction in during those early days?

Mamoon Rashid: We had a good client from South Africa who was selling to the Middle East. We had clients in Switzerland who were selling to Africa. We actually had clients in Timbuktu.

Sramana: When you got your client from Timbuktu you must have thought it was spam!

Mamoon Rashid: Yes, we did! We were surprised to find out it was real. We had customers from India, Thailand, and all over the world. The key point is that, at that time, most of our clients were outside North America.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga
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