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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Concur CEO Steve Singh (Part 11)

Steve says he does not segment his customer base by size. I push, because I think he should. SM: You do not have any bias one way or the other? SS: Not at all. Our distribution strategy is to reach customers of any size. We have no concentration of revenue, by customer or by market

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Concur CEO Steve Singh (Part 9)

As a smaller company, Concur does have to compete in a very deliberate manner with industry stalwarts such as SAP and Oracle. In order to win, they must have a definite comparative advantage. Here I search to understand what Concur believes is their unique advantage. SM: When you compete with SAP, what is your competitive

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Concur CEO Steve Singh (Part 8)

SM: Most of the expense reporting is around travel. However, there are other expenses to be incurred, right? SS: That is exactly correct, there are expenses which occur outside of travel. The same solutions can be applied whether it is business travel or taking a client out for lunch. The core point is that as

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