Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to an “Inc. 500” Company in Four Years

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Co-founder CEO Chris Farrell bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they competed in a crowded marketplace and built

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to a High Growth Inc. 500 Company

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  CEO Chris Farrell and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they competed in a crowded marketplace

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Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your team. I know you started very lean. That’s how successful bootstrapped companies tend to operate. What do you operate with today? Chris Farrell: Our first key hire was outside of tech. After that, we started with a user interface expert who’s now our VP of Product Marketing. He

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Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We just did the story about Expensify. Of course, they really benefitted from the heavy mobile adoption. Their go-to-market strategy is completely from mobile users. People in an organization start using their applications and then, they go and tell their accounting department, “We want to continue to use this. We should go buy

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Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is the content that you’re preparing and publishing still directed towards the accountants and CPA community who are coming to your site to engage with that content? Chris Farrell: Absolutely. We view it as a two-for-one because they get familiar with us. It’s wonderful from a brand association perspective.

Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you price? Chris Farrell: We price based on activity. For an active user or somebody who uses our expense report system actively in a given month, we charge $9 per month. Sramana Mitra: How big are your deal sizes given the segment that you’re going after is the top end of the QuickBooks customer base? What

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Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do? then Did you put together some sort of a customer advisory board of people who were prominent leaders in the accounting space? Chris Farrell: You’re right. It wasn’t anything as formal as a product counsel. It was actually a series of relationships. I began cold-calling a number of people in

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Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, Concur was already public and quite a successful company. What did you think of the opportunity? Let’s get a bit granular because we do cover Concur very extensively. Recently, we did a story on Expensify as well. The expense reporting space has shown up on our blog from many different angles. So

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