Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer traction, what did this altered process yield for you? Let’s say the first year of this altered process, how much did you sell?

Jorn Lyseggen: Our sales was probably half a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model? How were you charging?

Jorn Lyseggen: It was a SaaS model. It was also part service.

Sramana Mitra: Half a million dollars from how many customers? What were the average deal sizes?
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Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 4)

Jorn Lyseggen: We started approaching this in a completely different way. We tried hiring our own sales people. We wanted to engage the clients in a much more strategic way. Instead of talking about our product, we wanted to engage the clients on their domain and try to understand their pain. Once we understood their pain, then we started to talk about our product and how our product could address their pain. Without changing the product or the pricing, but just with the way we sold it, we saw a dramatic change. Very quickly, we started to attract a lot of clients.

Sramana Mitra: What were you hearing from these people? As you tried to sell it differently, what were they telling you?

Jorn Lyseggen: It was more a matter of listening to what the pain point was than to try to sell them a product. Before you try to sell them a product, first listen to them. It sounds very banal, but it actually has a profound impact. >>>

Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? You’ve been running this public company?

Jorn Lyseggen: Yes. I was a public CEO and experienced all the exciting stuff that it entails. After a while, I got eager to start a new company. I ended up starting Meltwater, which is the company I run today.

Sramana Mitra: Meltwater was started in 2003?

Jorn Lyseggen: Meltwater was started in 2001.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what was the premise of Meltwater when you started. What were you thinking?

Jorn Lyseggen: The idea that I was very intrigued by was that almost all of the information was published on the Internet. It was pretty clear to me that it was too difficult to manually track all that information that you’re interested in. >>>

Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of clients were you working with? Were they Norwegian clients? What was the client pool at that point?

Jorn Lyseggen: The client pool when I started out was Norwegian companies. We worked with the major banks. We worked with the major publishing houses and helped newspapers to create an online version of their newspaper. We work with companies that were selling things online. It started out in the Norwegian market. We also worked with government entities like the Norwegian Central Bank.

Sramana Mitra: How long does this mode of operation go on?
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Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Jorn started Meltwater in Norway and has scaled the company organically to $200 million. Fascinating journey!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Jorn Lyseggen: I was actually born in Korea. I came to Norway as a very small child. I was three years old. I actually grew up in a little farm in the middle of a deep, dark forest in Norway. You drive for hours into the deep, dark forest and then suddenly, there’s a small opening. Then, you come to a little village with 168 families. One of those families is mine.

Sramana Mitra: That’s charming.
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Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You did not go to the channel and try to convince them to sell your product. You generated market demand first. This is very much the methodology that we teach as well. That’s a good strategic point to highlight. Are there other pieces that you want to discuss?

Kurt Long: There are many other strategies that I brought forward from my experience at Open Network. One of them is that the CEO and Founder has to own the culture. As the business scales, culture doesn’t happen naturally. I learned that my number one job was to set the tone from the top about our values. That remains my job today. >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Once you identified what problem you were going to work on, did you then raise money?

Kurt Long: No. At this point, I had my own money. I paid people to build exactly what I wanted. I started selling it personally. I would not take any services revenue. I was determined to be a software company. My strategy was if I want this product to deploy fast, to be easy to understand, and to be up and running quickly, if I had to postpone the first sales because I’m not willing to offer services, all the time and energy is going back to the product. >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What area did you decide to go into and how did you determine what problem you were going to solve next? Talk to me about the thought process.

Kurt Long: When I started Open Network, I was scrambling. You don’t have anything. You’re trying to find a customer problem and you’re interacting with customers. By the end of that cycle, I sat in a corner office at the top of a building and had everybody doing everything for me. Quite frankly, I had forgotten how you actually start a company. I know that sounds funny but I really started from scratch. It’s a little bit of a process. At first, you start thinking, “I’m going to study things. I’m going to read analyst research. I’m going to talk to all of the people that I talked to as I exited from Open Network.” It turns out it’s not a great way to start a company. I had a few business plans and didn’t like any of them. I put them all down one day and said, “If I were going to sell here in Tampa Bay, who would I sell to again?” >>>