Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 1)

Chris and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they have competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position.

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

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you describe the value proposition of what you’re delivering to your customer base today?

John Sundberg: Generally speaking, most companies already think that they’re all messed up internally and it’s very hard for them to get something done. They already see the pain. What we do is we come in and say, “For these internal processes, we’ve got a system that is straightforward to create forms that people fill out and workflow processes are structured so that requests don’t get dropped. It is automated and you get visibility to it at all times. In a general sense, the average employee makes at least 10 requests a year. With our automated software, they save $10 per request. That’s savings of $100 per employee per year. If you take a look at a company with 5,000 employees, that’s savings of $500,000.”  >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ramp of the company? You said you did $100,000 and then $250,000 in the second year.

John Sundberg: We were doubling every year for about six years. Then it went flat for about five years during the economic slowdown. Last year, we did $7.5 million and the year before $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: You have not taken any financing? This is all bootstrapped, right?

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you have in terms of the content team? How do you run your content production farm?

John Sundberg: We have consultants and developers. We have product marketing managers. Those are all internal people that we have. We probably have a handful of customers that have done a couple of things too. They might create a piece or we will work with them to create the piece. Then we have an external marketing group that does, quite frankly, a fair amount. When I say a fair amount, what I mean is we’ve been working with them long enough for them to be a part of our company. Therefore, they know our company very well. They know our situation quite well. It’s pretty easy for them to create content that’s relevant, on-message, and accurate.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Unfortunately, that’s the problem with enterprise sales cycles. They are just so very long.

John Sundberg: Exactly. I did so many demos of the software to them. It was ridiculous. In one of the demos I did for them, they had people from all over the world call. I had given a 1-800 number. The phone bill alone that I had to pay was $3,000 for this demo. It was an interesting learning lesson for me. 1-800 numbers are not a good idea. If the company doesn’t have enough money to pay you to call, they don’t have enough money for software. I got rid of that 1-800 number six months after that.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a decision I made too.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go around that problem?

John Sundberg: We took the product and we broke it up into a whole bunch of smaller pieces. That big suite application had a survey application, scheduling application, workflow application, and form generation system. We broke them into smaller pieces so that we could then add in a complementary way. They had their existing pieces and it’s easier for us to sell a survey capability to add to their existing system. We effectively made a whole bunch of applications that were add-on in nature rather than core in nature.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If I got this right, you were drawn into this Remedy projects and as you were working on these, you saw the opportunity to build framework around the various Remedy problems that you were seeing and be able to productize what you were doing as projects essentially.

John Sundberg: I see it a little bit differently. I saw a business problem that people had and the common tool was Remedy. Therefore, I used the Remedy tool to solve these common business problems. You described it as Remedy problems. I describe them as business problems. Remedy was just the tool that usually got me invited to the party, so to speak.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 1)

You have heard me discuss bootstrapping using services quite a lot. Here, we also take on another important key strategy for customer acquisition: content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised and in what kind of circumstances?

John Sundberg: I’m currently in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where our office is. I was born in Minneapolis. I’ve been in Minnesota all of my life. My wife is from Connecticut. My upbringing was very open-minded. My dad taught positive attitude and sales training and indirectly, I’ve had that positive attitude all my life. He ran his own company. It was a small company. As a result of watching that while growing up, I thought I wanted to work in a big company. >>>