Adam Kalsey has been an Internet entrepreneur since 1995. He was the founder of IMified, a platform for instant messaging applications and was the CTO and VP of product for the cloud computing and advertising company, Pheedo. Adam became the product manager and developer evangelist for Tropo after his company IMified was acquired by Tropo’’s parent company Voxeo. Adam’s passion for startups and zeal to share his learning led him to found a startup community called SacStarts for Sacramento area.
Unlike many entrepreneurs/developers, Adam shares his knowledge and expertise with others on his blog. With over 10 years of experience, Adam Kalsey talked about his background, failures, learning from his startups, and a lot more on Foundora. Don’t miss reading it.
Interview Overview:
Can you give a brief overview about your entrepreneurial journey so far?
I’ve started 5 companies, including two acquisitions. One is still a private company, but I’m no longer involved in the management of the company. The other two didn’t work out as well and are no longer around.
I’m currently working for Voxeo, the acquierer of IMified, my last company. Im working on a startup product within the company that uses some of the technology they acquired from IMified. I also run an organization for local tech entrepreneurs and advise a number of local companies and entrepreneurs.
You have been an entrepreneur for a good part of your life; what do you believe are the best, worst aspects of being an entrepreneur?
There’s a lot of risk and uncertainty involved. When things don’t work out well, the financial and emotional impact can be hard. You’re in charge of your own destiny. There’s no one else to fall back on — everything that happens — good or bad — rests on you. When you’re an employee, there’s always someone else to lean on or kick the hard decisions up to. In the early days of a startup you’re often making decisions several times a week that could make or break your company.
Please help us understand about some of your major products such as IMified and Pheedo?
Pheedo is an RSS advertising and management platform. It’s designed to help publishers improve their usage of RSS and to help them monetize the content in those feeds. The product includes everything from analytics to show them what’s popular to optimization to make feeds work better across different feed readers.
IMified is a platform for building Instant Messaging and SMS applications. If you can build a web site, you can build an IM bot. No need to understand various network protocols or figure out how to scale your application.
IMified was acquired by Voxeo last year, can you tell us how the acquisition happened? How did you decide that it was the right time to sell off?
We met Voxeo’s CEO at BarCamp Orlando and found that a lot of our philosophies about how to do business were similar. Treat your customers well. Create things that are easy to use and easy to understand. Make complicated concepts easy for developers to understand and use.
Voxeo had some great ideas for how to bring IMified to their existing customers and products. They saw IMified as “IVR for Text.” They have a huge customer base including half of the Fortune 500. We saw this as a good opportunity to get our products into companies that we were unable to otherwise reach.
You have started SacStart for the Sacramento Start-up community. Tell us something about the activities in the group? What do you think are the benefits of joining local start-up communities? How can entrepreneurs make the most of it?
SacStarts is a very informal community. We have open casual coworking at a local coffee place each week and meet for dinner once a month or so. In startup hubs like the Silicon Valley and San Francisco, you’re surrounded by other entrepreneurs. You run into fellow founders at coffee places and lunch. There’s a constant stream of events going on where you see other startups and entrepreneurs.
Talking to fellow entrepreneurs is beneficial. The problems you experience, the questions you have, the successes you see… no one else in the world understands them. Sitting down with others that are facing the same things as you are can help you immensely. They’re your sounding board, your support group.
IMified is a developer facing product; Voxeo also has a developer facing product line, what do you think is the best way to reach out to developers for a developer facing product?
There’s two keys… One is to make sure that creating a whole product that’s easy to understand. From the marketing materials to the documentation, to the product itself, everything needs to be easy to pick up. Developers are going to lean toward building things themselves, so make sure your products make it so easy that there’s no
reason to even consider an alternative. Staff your support desk with real developers, people who can actually write the code that your customers are trying to write.
The second key is all around evangelism. Developers respect people who are technically competent. Go out there and talk to developers about everything. Don’t sit and pitch your product, but actually teach. Show them things they haven’t seen before. This applies to both live events like conferences and meetups and to the written word, both your own blog and guest articles in magazines and other blogs.
We like to hire developers who are able to go out and talk to other developers. And everyone from our CEO to the entire team behind Tropo (Voxeo’s cloud product that I work with) are technical. We’re geeks, so we can understand what geeks want.
You have been managing multiple products and was also the CTO of Pheedo; what do you think is the best software development methodology for a start-ups?
Any agile methodology is good, whatever system works for you. I’m a fan of Scrum. Short development cycles, iterative releases, constant re-evaluation of not just your product but of your your own processes. These all help you adjust to changing market conditions, shifting priorities, and learn from your mistakes and successes.
It is critical that a startup be able to pivot quickly and not get stuck going down a path that doesn’t work. Agile methodologies work well with that.
What is your take on the start-up methodologies like lean start-up?
Creating a business is a lot like the scientific method. You have a hypothesis: if I do X then customers will do Y. Build just enough to prove or disprove that hypothesis and then move to the next one.
You also have a limited amount of time and money. Spending a lot of time proving out a single business theory means you’ll have less time and money to try other theories if your first one doesn’t work out.
Startups that build a single monolithic product and don’t ship until it’s “just right” run the risk that the product they create isn’t something customers want. The various lean startup methodologies all attempt to help you keep from blowing your whole budget before you know what customers are willing to buy.
In all your projects, you must have had many ups and downs; What was your biggest learning experience?
My failures have all come from trying to go it alone. Making it as a single founder is infinitely more difficult than having co-founders. Co-founders cover each other’s weaknesses, they give you a sounding board, they keep you sane.
What would be your advice to upcoming and aspiring entrepreneurs?
Stop waiting. So many people I talk to have an idea and a desire to start something, but they’re waiting for the perfect time. There’s always going to be some reason and excuse why you shouldn’t be starting now. If there’s something standing in your way, just take care of it. All the problems that seemed like big deals before you got started end up looking pretty silly in retrospect.
