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 was instrumental in laying down the long-term vision and very helpful in successfully finding the next market opportunity in terms of growth and making the pivot. After that, we started to build mostly around developers and what we call product experts. We started out with a traditional model, which was to hire sales and support people. We realized that when we are selling to a professional audience, >>>

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 it.” Then their customers come and buy it. They are growing steadily very well. It’s an organic growth strategy. Was that mobile adoption a major technological shift that threw you into this kind of pivot three years back?

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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.

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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 is an average monthly deal size? >>>

Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size for you?

Ric Leutwyler: For independent hotels, which average 80 rooms per hotel, the deal size is $5,000 a year or more. If you’re talking about a Choice hotel as a group, it is around $25 million. It depends on whether we’re selling to independent hotels, small group, or giant companies.

Sramana Mitra: So there’s no bias in there. It’s all over the place.

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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 the industry introducing myself and the company and essentially engaging them in a dialogue. It was, at first, very informal. We just talked to the experts about how they saw the industry and how software companies could help.

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Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In a 30-second elevator pitch, what would be the target audience where you really shine?

Ric Leutwyler: Our target audience is the hotels that are in the limited to full-service range. They are looking for an economical approach, which they get from cloud solutions. They’re looking for the functionality that they need today but are also looking for the commitment that the functionality will evolve and keep up with the industry. That’s our sweet spot. If somebody is looking for an old and basic solution, then we’re not a good fit, because we’re very focused  on evolving that platform. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, Concur was already public and quite a successful company. What did you think of the opportunity? Let’s get a bit granular because we do cover Concur very extensively. Recently, we did a story on Expensify as well. The expense reporting space has shown up on our blog from many different angles. So we have an audience that’s familiar with what you’re doing. Could you help us understand, specifically, what you would identify as the opportunity to build a new company in that space? Positioning, by the way, is a discipline that we teach and explore very extensively and very diligently. It would be interesting for us to learn how you position your products.

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