Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: She’s also from the Midwest?

Josh Manion: Yes, she’s from the Chicago area. We settled around Chicago in the western suburbs. I took a quick job with a network technology bar. That didn’t work out very well. That was nine months of craziness. Their business wasn’t doing well in the post dot-com world.

After about nine months of that, my wife and I decided to found a company called Stratigent. Because we barely knew what we were doing, we decided that we would do analytics consulting. It’s something that I had developed some expertise in back at Myteam.com. My perception was the timing would be very good because it was all about accountability and bringing some rigor back into marketing that had maybe slipped away briefly during the dot-com days.

Sramana Mitra: What did you decide to do in terms of your own idea?

Josh Manion: The basis for the company strategy was we would effectively play the role that we couldn’t find when I was in Myteam.com and were struggling with how we will think about the data and analytical issues around what was an application running on the web. We looked extensively at that time for consultants to help us and really couldn’t find anybody who wasn’t aligned with a specific vendor or technology.

The approach that we were taking was not one of a leveraged off-the-shelf analysis, which was the rage at that time. As a result, we really had a difficult time finding anybody who could help us. That was the original premise for it. Fortunately, a lot of the folks that I had worked with at Myteam.com went to other companies post-acquisition. Those were some of our very first customers.

Sramana Mitra: When you got the company going in Chicago, who else was involved? Was it just you or were there other people?

Josh Manion: It was just my wife and I.

Sramana Mitra: Your wife is also from the technology field?

Josh Manion: Not really from the technology field, but she’s also an entrepreneur at heart. She ran business operations.

Sramana Mitra: What did you have to do to get the business going in terms of minimum viable product as it’s called now? At that time, this term didn’t exist.

Josh Manion: The initial product was really just the expertise that we professed to have, which in hindsight, we didn’t have that much.

Sramana Mitra: You said you had expertise but you really didn’t have any expertise. You were basically building it as you went along.

Josh Manion: Exactly. I’d like to think that we were getting smarter very quickly.

Sramana Mitra: You said your first clients were people whom you had worked with at Myteam who had now gone to other companies?

Josh Manion: That’s right. I would call them up and make the pitch.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion
1 2 3 4 5 6 7