If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The morning that Brexit sent shockwaves through the world economy, I spoke with Demitris Memos who is building a nicely scaling, bootstrapped SaaS company from Athens, Greece. It was thrilling to hear a story of success and hope against the larger backdrop of doom and gloom. Greece
Sramana Mitra: Can you backtrack for me for a second and answer a couple of questions before we get to this point? I have a bit of a gap in the process here. You said you were running a bunch of experiments and one of them turned into this situation. How many such experiments around
Sramana Mitra: What about funding? Peter Gassner: We had funding from angel investors. We started off with $3 million. Then we said, “This is good, but we need some funding from outside. We were looking for validation and professional funding, and the things that a VC could bring.” We raised $4 million. We thought we
Sramana Mitra: What year are we now? Joe Kinsella: 2012. Sramana Mitra: What was the relationship with Northbridge? Is that the company that had funded the company that you went to work for? Joe Kinsella: Yes, Northbridge was one of the investors in Silverback. One of the partners there, Jeff McCarthy, was on the Board
Peter Gassner: The thing that most people thought why it wouldn’t be good was that they’d say, “Hey, there are no big companies doing pharmaceutical CRM. Therefore, it’s not possible to build a big company doing it. What do you mean you will build your product on somebody else’s platform? Nobody had done that before.
Sramana Mitra: Did you go work for Dell? Joe Kinsella: I did. I like to tell people that I spent three years at Dell, two of which I can explain because I was under a contract. I wasn’t sure why I stayed the third year. Dell is a great company, but I’m a software person. Sramana
Sramana Mitra: Where did you find traction? In building the product for the pharmaceutical industry, how did you scope the product? Did you have some anchor customers? Peter Gassner: This wasn’t that complex really. This was pharmaceutical CRM. We just decided to go there. It’s a known area and these companies had systems for it.
Joe Kinsella: From there, I decided that I wanted to start a business. I started a company called Tarragon. I wanted to build out a tools business. It ended up being more of a consulting services business. I wasn’t able to balance the consulting and software side. I built a small team of people. We