Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all doing this. They’re all part of your marketplace now.

Charles Mi: Yes. ADARA marketplace contains a lot of the travel technology companies, rental cars, and hotels. They have 100% control over how the data is being used. By putting transparency and control in place, the data suppliers have a lot of confidence that the data won’t be misused.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In terms of building the company, you switched in 2008 to this travel data mode. Now, it’s coming up to seven years of executing on this business plan. You said you raised three rounds of financing?

Charles Mi: Since 2008, yes. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customer validation did you do at that point?

Steven Boye: I would say we didn’t really do any customer validation that early on. But we had a lot of background in office applications and helping people with Word and Excel. It was basically office automation or mobile enablement of people with their regular office documents. We were pushing the boundaries for what was possible with the technology back then.

Sramana Mitra: I see. Essentially, the funding that you were able to raise was based on your domain knowledge in office applications. It was not based on any customer validation.

Steven Boye: It was not based on customer validation. It was basically based on the prototype and the ideas we had. We had a product that we could show where you could install an application on your home computer. You can use your browser in your Nokia phone. You can have an >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though it was registered in Delaware, you were running the company in Denmark?

Steven Boye: You can say that the company’s engineering department was running out of Denmark. It’s actually the same today with Soonr. All engineering operations are done here in Denmark. All the financial, PR, HR, and business development operations are done in Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Are you the CEO of the company?

Steven Boye: No, I am the CTO of the company. Martin was the original CEO when we started the company. Initially, it was just the three of us.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that point when you were starting. You said you got funded right away. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I remember NetObjects.

Steven Boye: I moved back to Silicon Valley and lived there for a few years. NetObjects went public. My wife is a professor at a university in Denmark. She wanted to continue her career in Denmark, so we moved the family back to Denmark again.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Steven Boye: This was in 1998. Since 1998, I’ve been living in Denmark.

Sramana Mitra: What did you decide to do when you moved back to Denmark? >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What turn did the product take?

Brandon Levey: From a positioning standpoint, we had evolved to a real SMB solution. We would now position it much more as a multi-channel inventory order management solution for SMBs. The way that I like to think of the solution at the lowest layer is the management layer. It’s a small scale ERP for SMB. On top of that is an automation layer where we automate a lot of these business processes that are traditionally manual. On top of that, we started building out our intelligence layer.

Sramana Mitra: You were working with e-commerce merchants as well or just brick-and-mortar? Where was your sweet spot?

Brandon Levey: We’ve never just focused on one. That’s a very important part of what we do. What we like to say is we take a holistic approach to commerce. What that means is any way you can sell a physical good, we want to be a part of it. We want to be that underlying layer that makes >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does your work play in to the work of the SaaS providers like Aria? They are managing the online SaaS billing.

Christian Blume: They’re managing a broader spectrum in a much stronger niche market. What do I mean by that? They go into any type of service that could be a subscription, billable type of environment. Whether this is your utility bill or access to a cloud service such as a Box or a Dropbox, they can do all of that. What they actually offer is a very small subset of the solution that we actually have.

You are talking about an Aria system. They’re very specific and concrete around the subscription facilities and the engines that they offer around it. What they’re typically missing is any type of invoicing that’s associated with it. If you want to work with that kind of solution, you need to manage your own payment methods. You need to have your own fraud management and understand how international fraud has an impact on any type of solution that you have in place. You need to set up all of these different aspects to it in addition to the solution that they offer. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Specifically, what was that all about? What did you need to change in your style of operations?

Henry Albrecht: Since our product is about bringing culture to life and helping every employee improve, it has to be adopted at a pretty high level within the company to be successful. We needed the Chief Human Resources Officer, CEO, CFO, and others to be champions of the program. Are we hiring people who have the wherewithal and skills to get to that level? We have a Chief Operating Officer. That was a big step for us. We have a VP – Customer Success who came out of HR with 18 years’ experience. Those were just large executive, process, and technology investments. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It was a monthly recurring revenue though, right? It was a SaaS product?

Brandon Levey: Correct. It was the same model basically. In January of 2013, we hired Josh who used to consult small businesses. In March, we hired our first customer support rep who’s now a product manager at Stitch. That’s when things started to change. I like to joke that we accidentally started selling Stitch because Josh really liked talking to people. He’d say, “Maybe we should try calling our customers and helping them get set up.” When we did that, they would convert two or three times better. They stick around better. We started doing more and more of this. That just started showing a lot more initial traction. That’s when we actually started growing the company. >>>