Sramana Mitra: In that strategy, were you actually partnering with Salesforce and going to market through the AppExchange? Brad Peters: We were. Salesforce is a fairly hands-off partner. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge help. That has generally been my experience talking to other people. You find Salesforce customers on your own and
Sramana Mitra: What use cases are you finding adoption in? Mark Mader: The marketing operations is a big center of gravity within our businesses. They typically have many touch points within an organization who are responsible for either bringing something to market or managing the development of something. They’re usually the coordinators. When we look
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what happens after you did the reset. What was your go-to market strategy with the new horizontal product? Brad Peters: We had to sit down and figure out what the go-to market strategy was going to be. There was a lot of experimentation. We couldn’t make our enterprise product available
Mark Mader: The second piece is a fundamental shift away from how Google Spreadsheets and Excel store their data. When we think about work and tracking items, we don’t think about it as a collection of cells as you have in a spreadsheet. We think about it as a unit of work. A row within
Sramana Mitra: What was your original estimate of the TAM for your application in the financial services area? As the market was shifting, what did you estimate it down to that made you explore other verticals? Brad Peters: The TAM for each application was probably $100 million. It had to be $100 million to get
Mark Mader: One of the categories that really took quite some time to move was one of the biggest ones, the Office Suite. As we look at all the different categories that are forming today, many of them have direct analogs to the pre-cloud world. One of the things that we found fascinating was that
Sramana Mitra: Was the seed that you got enough to get you to the next milestone or did you have to raise? Brad Peters: We raised seed financing before we started. We couldn’t afford to make the mortgage payment without a little bit of seed financing. We got a little bit of seed financing from
This conversation takes our coverage of the cloud-based productivity space further. Sramana Mitra: Mark, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Smartsheet. Mark Mader: I’m the CEO of Smartsheet. We are a Software-as-a-Service provider that serves about 40,000 businesses today in over 150 countries. The category of solution that we provide is enabling