by Eric Lopez | at MinneBar 11 | 2:45 – 3:35 in Proverb-Edison | View Schedule
In just a little over a year, we imagined, bootstrapped, and launched our Enterprise Collaboration platform that helps more than 25K users find each other, share information, and collaborate.
Our story starts w/ a job change, a serendipitous lunch meeting at Brits pub. From my basement to our campsite at COCO, we built out our ambitions and drove our first revenues that support our team and activities. We currently have about 5 customers with an aggressive goal of 100 by mid-summer. Today, COCO uses our platform for their member collaboration. Our platform is also used by customers of Infor/Lawson, Cerner Healthcare, and a few others.
Our presentation will focus on the unanswered questions we had from a bootstrapping perspective, we will touch on culture, people, founders, legal, marketing, and strategy. We will discuss our first customer and the experience we had when the rubber met the road, we will talk about our next phase of product and business development. Finally we will share our lessons learned along the way - what worked well, what didn't. We hope to answer questions others like us may have or have had along their journey.
We will demonstrate/share some portions of our product for context.
I am currently CEO/Founder of WorkOutLoud.com
I bring more than 30 years of experience managing, developing and marketing high-end enterprise class software solutions in the ERP, Business Intelligence, CRM, Cloud, Social and Collaboration areas.
My background includes extensive hands-on experience in:
Platforms: * Cloud – AWS, and others on M/S, Linux, and Unix stacks * Mobile – designed responsive, Apple, and Android apps for app store/google play * Social – built three multi-tenant, enterprise platforms for collaboration (thousands of tenants) * ERP – extensive background in ERP applications (Financials, Supply Chain, and HR/PR) * Business Intelligence – More that 15 years of experience in collection and analytic solutions, currently working on research for a big data platform (Hadoop, Mongo)
Products: * Development & Design of many ERP and Social applications * Multi-tenant Architectures – Extensive experience in multi-tenant architectures for various cloud applications * Platforms – Microsoft and LAMP stack platforms (MS/Unix/Linux) * Product Management & Marketing – extensive experience in all aspects of product management and marketing
Business: * C-level experience – personal C-level experience and a natural ability to engage with C-Level roles * Entrepreneur – Passionate and committed to vision and execution * Budgets – Budgeting and planning experience * Management – built and managed both small and large teams * Start ups – Direct experience with 5 start-ups in both the services and product areas * Sales/Marketing – Sales and Marketing experience * Customer Relationships – extensive experience working directly with thousands of clients and organizations * Business Development – Formed and managed many business relationships over the years * Sold 2 businesses – Personally founded and sold 2 social platform businesses * Acquisitions – I have been involved with numerous identification and related due-diligence of strategic acquisition targets * Evangelism – tireless evangelist for innovative ideas
