548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How about getting your first product out? Were you bootstrapping to get to the first product?

Lloyed Lobo: We bootstrapped to about $10 million ARR. We just raised a round of funding around Thanksgiving last year.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk through the early part. You bootstrapped and you had validation because of your consulting work. How much of that consulting pool became customers of the product?

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have a wonderful positioning because anything that has a compliance angle to it has a very mission-critical purchase cycle. You must have experienced pretty high-velocity customer building.

Sarva Srinivasan: That’s correct. In parallel, we started building EZOPS. As part of our engagement, we were talking with the clients and their challenges. Oftentimes, it was just a lack of an end-to-end platform. It could be that I have the wrong data. Therefore, I’m not able to send the right information to the regulators. It could be that I have 10 different applications sending the same data and I can’t figure out what the right data is. These are very simple problems. 

548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 2)

Lloyed Lobo: R&D tax credit is a beachhead for us. My co-founder used to run this at KPMG. He was a manager at the R&D tax credit team. He said that it’s a manual and broken process. At the end of the year, we would go to companies and say, “Give us your shoebox.” But that shoebox is not just your receipts; it’s everything you did in R&D.

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing this out of Chicago?

Sarva Srinivasan: New Jersey. All three of us are from New Jersey. We started off in a small office back in January 2014.

Sramana Mitra: All these 20 clients, you serviced with just the three of you?

Best of Bootstrapping: Firmex Scaled with Angel Money in Canada

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

When we spoke in 2015, Joel Lessem was scaling a profitable company in Toronto called Firmex, and had only spent $4 million in angel money to get to almost $10 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Joel Lessem: I was born in Israel but raised in Toronto from the age of three. I grew up in Toronto.

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548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 1)

Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Welcome Lloyed. I’m looking forward to know you and understanding what you’re doing. 

Lloyed Lobo: Thanks for having me.

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can either one of you summarize Bikram’s background?

Sarva Srinivasan: Bikram spent most of his time in banking. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and then went on to work at McKinsey for a year or so. He then worked at Lehman, Goldman, and Citi. He comes from a background of building and running services operations at banks. 

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about what was the analysis of the market and where did you position EZOPS.

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 1)

This is a text book case study of founders with deep domain knowledge in starting with services and then productizing, eventually raising institutional capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born? Where does your journey begin?