696: The Debate: Are Patents "Entrepreneurial" Or Unfair?

Dimitris Giannoccaro. He founded IAMIP, in 2013, after an extensive career in engineering and intellectual property together with some of the strongest leaders and inventors at ABB. The urgent need for digitizing an intellectual property world and maximizing the potential of intellectual property successfully has been felt during his work at his company.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – n/a
• What CEO do you follow? – Björn Lilja of Kundo
• Favorite online tool? — Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I would never do this again"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Dimitris to the show
• 01:31 – IAMIP is a typical SaaS company
• 01:56 – IAMIP is where users can collaborate in real-time in order to access all the patents
• 02:49 – IAMIP has 3 target groups: small startups, medium-size companies and corporations
• 03:06 – Small startups still need to know how to protect their solution
• 03:22 – Medium and corporations are big companies and they want to make sure no one is infringing on their rights
• 04:12 – If you want to get acquired later on, you want to make sure you don't infringe on other's rights
• 04:42 – Patents are important for product
• 04:58 – Patents are also filed on services
• 05:32 – As a consumer, the focus is on the usability of the product or service
• 05:40 – If you want to make money right and keep growing, you want to have your IP
• 06:08 – Team size is 14
• 06:19 – IAMIP was launched 3 years
• 06:23 – Average MRR is $60K
• 06:38 – IAMIP currently has 500 users
• • 06:54 – There are 62 paying customers
• 07:18 – IAMIP raised 2 years ago, but it was initially bootstrapped
• 07:34 – Dimitris was 37 when he launched IAMIP
• 08:05 – IAMIP managed to have their first client after a few months
• 08:22 – IAMIP has 2 founders and the split is 50/50
• 08:59 – Dimitris regretted not inviting more people
• 09:55 – IAMIP has raised $1M on the first round
• 10:01 – IAMIP is in the process of raising an equity round
• 10:27 – Dimitris based the valuation on the future number of customers
• 11:08 – IAMIP didn't give a discount on their first round which is an equity round
• 11:44 – Gross customer churn
• 12:16 – Dimitris' tactic on having 0 churn
• 12:46 – 2016 revenue
• 13:08 – 2017 goal
• 13:16 – IAMIP has recently been accepted by the UCLA Amazon program
• 13:33 – CAC
• 13:59 – Everybody is part of the sales team
• • 14:30 – All of the people on the team are engineers and the 7 spend additional time in sales
• 14:51 – LTV
• 16:17 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Patents are important for growing businesses in order to protect your solutions.
• Having co-founders has its advantages and can be much better than doing it solo.
• You CAN acquire new customers without an expert salesperson.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives