Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about what was in the product.

Adam Stern: In the very early days, we were focused on terminal server environments and delivering Windows virtual machines to do web and SQL-based workloads. We did offer people the flexibility of building their own environments. They couldn’t build their own virtual machines. They had to rely upon us. It was a very managed type of service. The website was very simple. We just had a handful of products to offer. The amount of add-ons we had was very small. We basically gave you a machine with a licensed operating system, but we couldn’t give you the office applications. These are things that we were able to add.

One of our earliest customers was RPMC. They still are a customer today. They have 60 employees. We do their entire IT infrastructure. They use line of business applications and the typical back office applications. They do it through a terminal server environment that we built initially in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: For the product, what was the market penetration experience like? How did that ramp? Who were the first customers? Who were the early adopters and how were you recruiting them?

Adam Stern: One of our initial customers was a company who was trying to develop a music application for gaming called BOOM! Music. They were already a cutting-edge company with a forward outlook. They’re highly technical people and saw the value in the technology. At that time, we required someone who was very technical to be early adopter of this technology. There wasn’t a lot of literature out there. There wasn’t this large market push from every direction like we have today.

When you went to a customer and said, “You need to use virtual dedicated servers,” people ask why. They say, “I have a server in my office. I’ve had it for the last 10 years.” Highly technical folks understand the value of doing it. We have resellers who came on board early on who saw the value in it. It’s something that a lot of business owners really love. You need to be willing to take that risk at that time on the technology that no one had even discussed before.

Sramana Mitra: What I’m hearing is your indirect go-to market strategy is you found a bunch of resellers who resonated with your value proposition and took your product to market.

Adam Stern: That’s right. Prior to 2009, we were doing about half a million dollars a year. When we took the leap into the cloud hosting market, our revenues went from half a million to $900,000 a year. We, very quickly, ramped up. We actually doubled our business from 2011 to 2012 from $900,000 to $1.8 million. Then to almost $3 million the following year. It was a meteoric rise in revenue the minute people saw the value in it.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern
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