From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 5)

SM: Do you work integrated deals with other major software vendors?

RK: We have some, but the majority of the time users need to go install the YouSendIt plug-in on their own. We have done a little bit of both, and we would like to do more integrated solutions. We already have users in the video and photography space. We just want to make it easier for those users. We want to be part of their workflow environment.

SM: Once you have the individual, how do you get into the enterprise?

RK: A lot of it is grassroots driven. We have done very little outbound sales. We have a very small inside sales team, and that may change over time. Right now we are still proving the enterprise market. We are well established in the small business area and get a lot of five-seat or ten-seat deals. When a large company comes to us we usually already have 300 or 400 people inside of that company using YouSendIt.

SM: Who starts the enterprise buys?

RK: We have found that 60% of the buyer engagement comes from the IT department. It is someone who maintains critical infrastructure for the corporation. That is great because it is exactly who we want. The question is no longer, “How many of my people will send big files?” to “How many of my people will ever send a file?” because they don’t have to deal with e-mail bounce back, raising e-mail limits for a week, or other management issues.

People are now starting to look at us as an attachment management solution for all employees. Large files sizes are putting increased strain on e-mail systems, plus a lot of people use their e-mail as a file management system. They are not ready to abandon the Exchange infrastructure, but they are willing to put their attachment management system in the cloud. Regulated business are not using us so much for large file storage as much as they are for secure file storage. They need an audit trail for compliance.

SM: That is a very significant market. At some point you are going to have to define your business practice area.

RK: We are happy to leave that to other companies, it is just that some of our users have had unique solutions with the toolsets we provide. Five years ago I was still assembling servers on my living room carpet getting ready to drive them to the datacenter when the phone rang. It was somebody in the CIO group at GE. He had noticed 150 of his employees using YouSendIt and he wanted me to either sell him some enterprise appliance solution or he was going to turn us off. I told him to turn us off.

That is a business we never wanted us to be in. You have to move so many boxes for that type of enterprise appliance function to be worthwhile that it just does not make sense. I was happy to let GE find a different solution. I like a simple, elegant business model. A lot of the companies that shut us off five years ago are coming back to us now because they have already put so much of their infrastructure in the cloud that they do not have a problem putting their attachments in the cloud as well. We are winning those deals now against entrenched companies with on-premise appliance solutions.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran
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