Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, what gave you confidence that you would be able to solve this problem and build a product? Did you have an architecture already laid out? Did you have the product design already in place?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you quit and then start or did you start while you still had your job? How did you get started?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 1)

Jonathan has found a great, very large niche within the AI-powered Developer Tools space.The idea was born out of deep domain knowledge and customer exposure. VCs love such depth of technical insights and have funded Moderne lavishly.

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You said at the beginning of the interview that you were trying to make up for the margin gap in services companies with velocity. Did you succeed in doing that? In the ten years that you’ve been in business, did you succeed in growing at a very high velocity?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of enterprise conversational AI applications that you’re talking about are happening more on the customer end – customer service, sales, or customer relationship management. It’s not much on the finance end. So, you rightly point out that this is a more of an open area where you’re starting to see traction.

What is the business model of how you are going to market with your AI solutions? When you do this conversational AI or automation projects, how are you pricing it?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you about the delivery side. So you and your friend Chandra started the business. How did you grow the implementation team?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you quantify what was happening in these accounts, you were landing the accounts with your ERP channel and partnership management expertise and then growing those accounts. So, when you landed those accounts, what were the deal sizes and what kind of deal sizes were you able to expand these accounts to?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In this niche, did you have customer relationships?

Anji Maram: Yes. Especially in the Bay Area, there were several customers who needed this business process to be implemented. Due to my consulting experience and my prior company’s experience, we already had a trusted relationship with the industry.