Sramana Mitra: If I were you, I’d take more of that responsibility on the fact that you didn’t necessarily know how to explain it to investors. If you did, this is not so difficult to understand. Andrew Plato: I suppose. It is true that it took a lot of iterations to figure out how to
Sramana Mitra: Do you have about 50 customers right now? Andrew Plato: That sounds right. We’ve got a mixture of some on our platform. It’s not quite 50. It’s probably in the low 20’s. We’d 12 on the platform as of this year. Plus some existing business. Sramana Mitra: These 20 odd customers have all
Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about your go-to market experience. Were the first people you went out to people that you had been selling your professional services to? Andrew Plato: It’s a combination. We went to some of our existing customers first. Many of them struggled to even comprehend what we were doing.
Sramana Mitra: Which segment of the customer base did you go out to sell it to? Andrew Plato: One of the things we learned very early on is that our product is very appealing at the enterprise SaaS level. Admittedly, it wasn’t what I originally thought. I thought we were going to be more mid-market.
Andrew Plato: I kept noticing that these companies kept tripping over integrating multiple components. Everything was custom. They can never turn it into a full-on platform. There were technical problems. AWS was stymied by this to some extent as well. They couldn’t quite pull it all together.
Sramana Mitra: You were doing service contracts basically? Andrew Plato: Yes. I did technical writing. I did a little bit of software development and website design. In 1999, I switched my company and became a security service provider. I was reselling other people’s security tech.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We’re big fans of unfair advantage derived out of deep domain knowledge. Read how Andrew played his. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?