Bootstrapping to $12M+, Getting Ready to Raise Money: MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like you avoided the problem of becoming diluted in a broad collaboration market by focusing on your original premise. Is that a fair statement?

Aaron Fulkerson: Yes. We went back to what we were originally very excited about. This is a valuable lesson for other entrepreneurs. You will have investors and other entrepreneurs who want to steer your product in a different direction, and you have to be very diligent to stay focused. We knew that we wanted to create a place for people across the organization to collaborate and create knowledge around supporting customers in their use of a product. That product could be a manufactured product or a service by extension. HTC and Intel are customers of ours. They all had a hard problem to solve and turned to us to solve it.

When I made the decision to return to our roots, I thought that we were going to focus on a small niche. Since 2010 I have been proven completely wrong. We were thinking documentation, and we do indeed support documentation. The reality is that PDFs and other ways of creating static documentation are not good for analytics. They do not enhance a cross-channel customer support experience. If you make documentation web native on a restful platform, then that knowledge is now exposed as a service you can plug into your applications and hardware. Suddenly it is not a niche play around docs. It is not a trend that is driving buyers.

Customers are looking online now more than ever. I saw a stat two weeks ago from Forrester that eight years ago, only 20% to 30% of customers self-educated online. That number is now 70% to 80% online. Young startup companies or electronics companies are willing to put their product knowledge into MindTouch because they know their prospective customers are going to go online to do their research. They know their potential customers are not looking for the fluffy stuff, they are looking for the product details.

Sramana: Do you see this product being used in pre-sales customer support or post-sales customer support?

Aaron Fulkerson: It is really used across the board. Other knowledge management support systems are focused on the narrow band of break and fix. MindTouch is like walking into the Apple Store to going to the Genius Bar. You walk in with your reservation where the genius solves your problem, and at the same time you learn how to use your product better. Previously user manuals were written by technical writers who were in the bowels of the product. You then had e-learning people who produced videos and how-to sessions that were completely separate. You would then have product support people who produced “how to” articles, and they were a completely separate group. You then have partners who are operating in that space.

MindSpace makes it possible for all of those people to collaborate around knowledge generation. We do smart things to capture that knowledge from the different players in the community. When we serve an article to a customer, it includes related knowledge.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $12M+, Getting Ready to Raise Money: MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson
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