Two software developers (married couple) start their own business in 1996. Now they have 20 million $ revenue in 2010. They worked at night to develop their software. From 18-03 every day after day job. Their time tracking and invoicing software as service called replicon.
Here are some notes from interview:
- Collected credit cards to finance company initially, then had debt 90.000$
- built 4 programs for business but was not successful.
- Started consultancy service to pay debt.
- Found that they spend lots of time invoicing and counting costs, and decided to write program to do it automatically.
- Sold program as shareware with 1 month trial.
- Had clients that buy 100 licenses for 30$ each.
- Worked 8-18 as consultant, 18-03 to develop software. 03-08 sleep. Managed their time very well and had huge motivation to work in this schedule.
- Left consultancy when they had 20K $/month from software.
- Had their client as angel investor 500K.
- Had other investors 2,5 million $. then returned their money back due to separate interests. Investors wanted to sell quickly and earn some money.
- Switched to SAAS model and serving 7k clients with 800k users.