Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to cover this CEO transition, which is always a tricky thing to do. For founders to let go and bring on a new CEO is a tricky transition. How did you do it? What wisdom do you have to offer for people who are trying to do that? Kevin Groome: Let

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Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major inflection point? Kevin Groome: The introduction of Campaign Drive. We kept on building the software and getting more of our legacy customers over to the SaaS platform, which was an enormous risk point. By 2014, we were able to say that we had 90% of our legacy customers on

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Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many clients did you have in 2007? Kevin Groome: Brands under management were 40. Billing relationships were probably 15. Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level were you at? Kevin Groome: We were at around $1.6 million in subscription revenue. We used to call ourselves an ASP.

Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How big was that deal with Marriott? Kevin Groome: At that time, not that big. It was less than $100,000 a year. They are now our largest client. They spent probably $30 million with us. Sramana Mitra: $100,000 for a small company year-over-year is not a small amount of money.

Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me start driving you towards the entrepreneur journey story. When you decided to launch this, who developed the software? How did you finance the software development and getting to a product? The idea came from a particular client situation where you experienced this problem. You have an understanding of the pain point.

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Bootstrapping a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay in that advertising agency? Kevin Groome: In 1998, I began to make a transition. There were two reasons why. One was we began to see that the advertising business was shifting. Even then, we could feel that the advertising industry’s old model, which was formed in the 60’s,

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