If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. ActiveCampaign Founder CEO Jason VandeBoom had built a disciplined, profitable business when we spoke in 2019 and had scaled it to $40 million in 2017 revenue. The company was first bootstrapped using services, and later raised ~$20 million in funding. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. ActiveCampaign Founder CEO Jason VandeBoom had built a disciplined, profitable business when we spoke in 2019 and had scaled it to $40 million in 2017 revenue. The company was first bootstrapped using services, and later raised ~$20 million in funding. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the
ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom has built a disciplined, profitable business and scaled it to $40 million in 2017 revenue. The company was first bootstrapped using services, and later raised ~$20 million in funding. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in
Sramana Mitra: What else is tricky that is worth discussing that people can learn from? Jason VandeBoom: I think it’s really trying to find that optimal speed of growing. Just in the last 12 months alone, a lot of people can look at our company and say, “Why don’t you triple the sales team?” I
Sramana Mitra: This $20 million that you brought in, did you deploy it into operations or did the founders take liquidity from that investment? Jason VandeBoom: It’s mostly just there for making the right decisions. We haven’t really deployed it. It was never our intent to push that to sales and marketing, which is the
Sramana Mitra: What was the next inflection point? Jason VandeBoom: Right as we were getting comfortable with SaaS, we were still very much similar to being a contact list management tool. We quickly realized that we don’t want to be an email marketing company. It didn’t follow any of our beliefs. It didn’t even follow
Sramana Mitra: How did you tackle that change? Jason VandeBoom: We made the decision to make the switch. This was a big change, but we did it very slowly. Sramana Mitra: When was this? Jason VandeBoom: Around 2012. We started offering this recurring option and we just put it in the background and then we
Sramana Mitra: This is an entrepreneur’s journey that we are trying to capture. When you started, what did you start with? Jason VandeBoom: I started with the bare bones of just communicating with customers. Think of a system that brings in customer names and email addresses and you can send a campaign to them. I