Sramana Mitra: How is Runecast positioned? What is the go-to-market?
Stan Markov: We started developing the MVP in 2014. We launched at VMWorld in San Francisco in 2015. At that time, our product was oriented towards VMWare vSpheres. It was proactive troubleshooting but also security hardening. It was a lot on the IT operations and configuration management side.
Over the years, our customers started asking us, “Can you help me be compliant with HIPAA or GDPR?” So, we added a lot of compliance standards and vulnerability management. Over the years, we added a lot of compliance and security capabilities on top of the IT operations management capabilities. Now, Runecast caters to the IT department of the organization. It covers security and compliance automation and IT operations management automation.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you were starting the company? How many co-founders did you have?
Stan Markov: We’re five in total.
Sramana Mitra: All five are developers?
Stan Markov: One was in service management. Naturally, he gravitated towards sales and marketing. Me, being an IT architect, I had to do a lot of customer-facing engagements as well.
Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground? Did you guys put in your own money?
Stan Markov: We got initial investment accelerators. They invested the initial €140,000. They gave us offices and unlimited coffee and Red Bull. We were very lean in the beginning and didn’t spend almost anything. We were used to certain salaries from the corporate world. There were periods where we didn’t take salaries until we got our first big investment, which was €1.6 million.
Sramana Mitra: During those couple of years, were you able to close customers?
Stan Markov: Yes. The beginning is always difficult. I still remember when we launched. We were at VMWorld. The doors just opened and thousands of people flocked in. It was the first time when the world was going to see our baby. We had slides with customer logos. That was the day when we launched. These customer logos were not paying customers; they were just trying Runecast and doing testing.
Getting to that first paying customer took two months. It came from someone who I spoke to at VMWorld. Later on in the year, coming up to the first seed investment, we did sign up some customers. Things were not going as fast. We definitely started generating revenue.
Sramana Mitra: When did you get the €140,000?
Stan Markov: End of 2014. We didn’t get them all at once. When we pitched, we had no product. We just had slides.
This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov
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