Reality of Bootstrapping

sasha uritsky

Aug 17, 2015

Going after investors? Do you know that less than 1 percent of startups actually raise VC (or angel) capital, which means that the vast majority are self-funded. Yet the main reason for it simply lies in the inability of most companies to find investors.

Bootstrapping, however, has several strategic advantages for your company's future growth. Perhaps the biggest is retaining the majority of shares and control over the strategy and direction your company is moving towards.

It also teaches financial discipline. Bootstrapping at the start helps to understand the importance of revenue and cash flow, as opposed to unabridged product development, and keeps you connected to your company's financial reality. Only when profitability increase do you then green-light new opportunities, increased risk-taking, and growth acceleration.

In reality, the founders are expected to be flexible. While entrepreneurs have certain intentions and philosophies when they are starting out, a hallmark trait for successful founders is the ability to adapt to changing environments and opportunities.

Sometimes, that means waiting a long time to generate the financial metrics that really matter, revenue and profit. By challenging your leadership team to focus on building the business organically and figuring out how to make the company consistently profitable on a model that can scale without VC capital, you make your company more valuable to future investors.

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Microsoft AI products

Microsoft product strategy has always been and still remains that of ‘zero alternative’. Their ultimate policy is for their customers to have no choice but to embrace only Microsoft products. Consequently they created and are offering products and solutions in (almost) every segment of IT enterprise and consumer market, including, but certainly not limited to, their own data base, their own cloud services, operating system, office tools, programming language, and many more.

Not only do Microsoft offer wide variety of products, they tie them up together in a unified ecosystem that makes it easy for components to connect and interact. At the same time, this ecosystem is hostile to non-Microsoft products.

Microsoft strategy for the burgeoning, fast growing AI segment is similar:

Create products to address all parts of the AI market, add them to the ecosystem to ensure easy compatibility from within and difficulty of use from outside.

Currently the products on offer are:

- Microsoft AI engine, called LUIS. It is supposed to compete with other major industrial AI systems such as IBM Watson, and has similar training methodology. It offers webhook interfacing via endpoints.

- Microsoft chatbot building platform, called, surprisingly, Microsoft Bot Platform. It addresses the popular demand for easy chatbot design and provides seamless connectivity with main user interfaces, such as web interface, SMS, mobile, and messaging platforms.

- In addition Microsoft offers their own messaging platform in Skype.

The main advantage of using Microsoft AI products is the built-in connectivity with user interfaces.

The main disadvantage is in their ‘zero alternative’ policy - once you’ve chosen a Microsoft product you are likely will be forced to choose only Microsoft products for the duration of your project.

Top 5 Reasons to Use Artificial Intelligence Chat in Your Contact Center

1. Zero Wait Times

Do you suffer from long chat queues? How about any chat queues? Can you imagine a world where your customers are either immediately engaged in a proactive chat, or can easily decide to engage in a on-demand chat and get immediate service, no matter how busy your contact center is? Well, that day is today. With AI chat integrated into your contact center customers can be served immediately with no additional agent resources required. Now you can change your focus from calculating the time before a chat session starts to hcounting the number of chat sessions escalated to a live agent (We’ll give you a hint: It’s a lot less with Chat AI).

2. The High Efficiency Rate

The average chat session is completed in 42 seconds. With most questions being answered in just a few short seconds (Unless you’re Zappos, of course), Chat AI can quickly and effectively address most problems today, without having to engage a live agent. The savings in time and abandonment rate combined with the increased customer satisfaction, not only reduces costs, but delivers a measureable improvement in performance and customer perception.

3. It Really Understands Language

True Artificial Intelligence is not the robotic, sometimes irrelevant interaction of yesterday. Answers are more personalized, relevant, and complemented by the newly acquired ability to access multiple data sources to deliver the best possible responses to inquiries. The technology “learns” the longer it is deployed, as a result customer experiences improve with time without the need for additional investments in technology, people, or processes.

4. No such thing as a “Sick Day”

AI doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t get sick, you don’t need to train it, and it’ll never quit in the middle of a seasonal rush. You don’t even need to give it lunch, breaks, or let it go to the bathroom. Imagine how easy Workforce Management becomes when all you’re doing is flipping a switch. Scheduling becomes less and less of an issue over time, as the application continues to learn, making your investment more valuable over time.

5. 24x7x365

Imagine the increase in sales volume and support cases your business could handle if you’re able to offer 24x7x365 chat. And cart abandonment plummets when customers are offered chat. Today Chat AI can answer anywhere from 70-90% of customer inquiries meaning that only the most verbose requests require a human, and at an operational cost that is often 4 times less than the cost of staffing a contact center.