Matt Wensing from Stormpulse (disclaimer: I’m an investor, long story below) generously took some time off of managing the nation’s severe weather risks to appear on our podcast.  (Keith Perhac couldn’t be with us when we taped this, as he was celebrating the birth of his second daughter.)  It’s been about six months since our last episode but I think this probably makes up for it, as it’s a cracker of an episode.

I apologize in advance for my audio quality — I was calling internationally from an iPhone.  If you’re an audiophile, we have a transcript below, as per the usual.  As always, the transcript includes notes from me [Patrick notes: called out like this.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• The long arc of Stormpulse’s transition from a bootstrapped freemium weather site to being one of the four links on Obama’s dashboard
• Why Stormpulse had a difficult time raising funding early, and how they eventually overcame this
• Some actionable tips on how you can avoid Valley pathologies if raising is in your future
• How to think about pricing and selling a critical B2B application, and how to move from scalable low-touch sales to high-touch Big Freaking Enterprise sales

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~96 minutes, ~88MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Growing Stormpulse From Humble Beginnings To The White House And Beyond

Patrick McKenzie:  Hi, this is Patrick McKenzie for the the Kalzumeus Podcast. Keith Perhac can’t be with us today, because he’s celebrating the birth of his second daughter. I’m here with Matt Wensing, who’s the founder and CEO of Stormpulse.

Matt Wensing:  Hey, how you doing, Patrick?

Patrick:  I’m doing great, Matt. Thank you so much for taking the time to have a podcast with us today. I was just looking back at Hacker News today, because I gave it up for Lent, but now that I’m back and can check [on the thread we met on], I realized I have known you for exactly 1,300 days.

Matt:  [laughs]

Patrick:  You had your first HN post of Stormpulse about three years ago or so, give or take, and it was a like, “Rate my brief elevator pitch,” and I gave you some advice on that.  We started our email correspondence after that. For those of us who have not been following you obsessively for the last 1,300 days, what is Stormpulse?

Matt:  [laughs] Yeah, first of all, thanks. The HN connection is definitely fun. Stormpulse, it started out really just as a project and an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head, because a bunch of hurricanes had hit south Florida, which is where I was born and raised. It ended up growing up from just being a project that I worked on in nights and...

For the full transcript see here.