Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit more about some of the granular details of specific elements? OJ Whatley: In 2000, I walked into a watch store and I happened to pick up these hardcover books on the history of Panerai. They were like coffee table books. I went on eBay and found about eight of these
Sramana: It sounds like you discovered the business need by recognizing the lack of tools for CFOs, and that you discovered the lack of those tools while you were working as a CFO consultant. Is that a correct statement? Rob Hull: Yes, that is. There were not good tools for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analytics.
Sramana Mitra: If you could be more granular, how do you account for that? What data can you work off of and how do you tie that to how you charge? John Wallace: I thought you were going in the direction of how I know what they spend. So you mean how do we measure
Sramana: What timeframe does that bring us to? Rob Hull: That brings us up to 1999. Our CEO had decided he was going to be leaving and the world was moving quickly outside of RMS. The Internet was going strong and the dot com boom was going in full force. I looked around and realized
Sramana Mitra: What were the backgrounds of these other two companies? Were they using a vertical approach? John Wallace: No, they’re horizontal. I think what they have in common is that they have simplified the problem by collecting data off of Excel. They try to get themselves on the website. It makes the day of
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. OJ Whatley did $6 million in revenue in 2006 from his home, with ‘me, myself, and I.’ Further elaborating on the ultra-light startup trend, we bring you his story of approaching $20 million with 20 employees. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We continue our coverage of fat startups, how they get funded, built, and scaled in this series with Adaptive Insights. Lean startups get a lot of attention now, but I have been covering fat startups as well with stories like Adaptive Insights. Sramana: Rob, let’s start by
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about that? John Wallace: The problem now has a name. It’s not an ideal name but it has a name. It’s called marketing attribution. It’s looking at the effectiveness of marketing spend. The field closest to that would be approaches of this in Statistics in the past 20 years –