Alex Hawkinson bootstrapped BrightAI to $80M in revenue before raising $75M, emphasizing the importance of discovering a repeatable pattern before scaling.
Alex Hawkinson bootstrapped BrightAI to $80M in revenue before raising $75M, emphasizing the importance of discovering a repeatable pattern before scaling. His philosophy: If an idea doesn’t show real potential in 18 months, it's the wrong problem to pursue.
Even though it was successful, it was a really challenging business. And why? Because, you know, are you solving an important enough problem? I mean, does if you're a small business owner, I mean, I'll ask you like, do you wake up and think about hosted messaging every day? Like, no. No. The answer is no. You think about how to find customers, how to service customers, like what's your product, those things. And so, Aptics was a great, it was a great experience and we had a good, you know, success in the company. But I really I started to feel this this need like you know if you even if you have a great team which I have there if you focus them on a problem that's not meaningful it's like you can you can manage to push the boulder up the hill but as I'll talk through later experiences if you pick the right problem with a great team like it feels a million times easier because the right
people the right capital all the things want to happen you know for the right right right type of business Seven.