Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let me suggest something else as well. You know there’re so many cloud apps right now. It’s becoming very fragmented and there is a large number of point solutions all over the place. With an enterprise company with lots of resources, you can potentially avail of integration resources to manage all these and to coordinate and link things up. There is also a huge amount of cloud services and applications consumption in the small business category. There, the resources just do not exist to be able to stitch all these things up and to integrate. What is your view of that world?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 6)

Mark Mader: Then, there was the promise in native app development that went, “Why don’t you build it with a framework and the framework can propagate your app to all these different device platforms?” That failed miserably. The performance did not meet client’s expectations for almost every provider who tried that. Ten people said, “What’s the promise of HTML 5?” That also failed. User experience level was not high enough. We’ve gone from a web app world to where people’s expectations on solutions being, “I want a compelling web experience plus I want a compelling native app experience so that I can access, update, and share my information from wherever I am.”

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Given that’s your sweet spot, whom do you consider as your direct competitor?

Mark Mader: By far in a way, the largest direct competitor remains the traditional spreadsheet. There’s not any other SaaS provider today that uses our form factor – the spreadsheet grid that we present in a collaborative way. When you look at the other markets right now – whether it’s email automation, surveying, CRM, or file sync and share – most of them have multiple participants. Look at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, you could just go on and on about all the competitors in those specific niche categories. I think what happened in our category was people conceded the market to Google and Microsoft. When in fact, there was a huge opportunity to innovate on something that is 20 years old in concept. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In that strategy, were you actually partnering with Salesforce and going to market through the AppExchange?

Brad Peters: We were. Salesforce is a fairly hands-off partner. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge help. That has generally been my experience talking to other people. You find Salesforce customers on your own and tell the story to them directly. AppExchange was a nice technical integration point. It wasn’t that great a marketing tool.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard big feedback on that. Some people have been very successful generating leads out of AppExchange and some have not. It sounds like in your case, it has not.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases are you finding adoption in?

Mark Mader: The marketing operations is a big center of gravity within our businesses. They typically have many touch points within an organization who are responsible for either bringing something to market or managing the development of something. They’re usually the coordinators. When we look at the personas within our customers, they are very distinct users. Some of them are people who initiate process but they don’t invite anybody. Others are >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what happens after you did the reset. What was your go-to market strategy with the new horizontal product?

Brad Peters: We had to sit down and figure out what the go-to market strategy was going to be. There was a lot of experimentation. We couldn’t make our enterprise product available to everybody from day one. So we had to pick a small piece of it and make that available. It was not able to satisfy the entire market. We had to find little pieces of that marketplace that we could grow, expand, and drive. We tried a lot of value propositions – some of which worked, many didn’t. Ultimately, as we kept building the product and getting it richer and more robust, we continued to put more enterprise capabilities into the product. As we ultimately got those enterprise capabilities into the product, we started to compete in that main market. It was late 2010 when we really nailed it and things started to click. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 3)

Mark Mader: The second piece is a fundamental shift away from how Google Spreadsheets and Excel store their data. When we think about work and tracking items, we don’t think about it as a collection of cells as you have in a spreadsheet. We think about it as a unit of work. A row within our world represents a unit of work whether it’s a task, contact, or candidate. These are all things that exist within our applications. We’ve found that while people like the simplicity and flexibility of spreadsheets, what very often happens was when they shared those with others, people would make changes that were very unpredictable. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your original estimate of the TAM for your application in the financial services area? As the market was shifting, what did you estimate it down to that made you explore other verticals?

Brad Peters: The TAM for each application was probably $100 million. It had to be $100 million to get into it. The idea would be you could find multiple of these $100 million segments. We weren’t sure, but we figured that there are roughly 100 financial services institutions and 150 to 200 minor ones. If we could get a reasonable percentage of them, we’ll probably hit 50% of the TAM, or about $50 million. >>>