How to Sustain a Passionate Start Up Over the Long Haul with Shilpi Sharma

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Shilpi Sharma is the co-Founder and CEO of Kvantam Inc., a marketing attribution and performance company.  She helps brands understand how their marketing dollars are working and makes sure they are spending on the right things. They start by tying marketing dollars to sales and figuring out where they are getting the most return on their investment.

Before Kvantam, Shilpi was a consultant for software companies. She got her MBA and joined larger companies to get experience on a bigger scale. It was a lot of travel, a lot of learning and a lot of hard work. She’s been in consulting her entire career.  So why did she leave the security of consulting to enter the wild ride of entrepreneurship? She’s here today to share the story.

In this interview Shilpi shares:

• The types of marketing that companies actually do
• Why some companies want to see ROI from marketing and some don’t
• How Shipli has identified her ideal customer
• Why she left consulting to start over as an entrepreneur
• How she felt limitations as a consultant
• The iteration of her first start up and why she pivoted
• Her nearly $170K investment in her company
• Why you shouldn’t think about making money on your first venture
• Your first company is where you learn and make mistakes, but probably won’t make money
• How she found a pilot company for her start up
• The importance of having a way to get data, since you can’t “make” data
• Why she invested in the backend, but didn’t spend a dime on UI
• Where she got seed funding of $1 million dollars
• How she transitioned from a FT job to her own start up
• How long into her entrepreneurial journey before she committed to it full time
• Ways that she had to deal with self-doubt in a start up situation
• How to deal with the emotional side of running a start up
• The steps they took to learn optimization and the mathematics behind it
• Why they decided to let their first client go, even when they had no money coming in
• How she landed her first big client and then grew that relationship
• Why she isn’t seeking another round of investment after the seed round
• How she views her business in a much different way than VC’s
• Why it’s hard to find talented people to work in a start up, even in India
• Why she felt it was important to have a co-Founder

Connect with Shilpi:

Website: www.kvantuminc.com

Connect with her on Twitter: @shilpi_SV