Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened after you raised the $15 million? How did the business move? What were the strategic moves that you made to get to the next level?

Josh McCarter: The major move that we made was, we started investing in sales and marketing. We started building out our team. We took on some larger contracts that, in hindsight, were not the best things for us to do over the long-term for the company. They were big contracts. They were big name companies that helped us gain credibility with our investors and with other people in different segments. They were all multi-million dollar, multi-year contracts.

Sramana Mitra: What was wrong with those contracts? Typically, multi-million multi-year contracts are good news. Why was it bad news? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have a third segment that you wanted to talk about?

Mike Ward: Those are all the three: corporate, and I believe I touched on consumer and e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: You touched on consumer and e-commerce. I don’t think you elaborated on the corporate.

Mike Ward: From a corporate perspective, it covers many different industries that we can work in. We have some success in certain industries and that might be because of acquisition channels. We can really come in and facilitate in any industry. What we tell the clients is, we’re almost a free hire in their treasury team under the CFO. We can come in and help, not just manage post-sale delivery of these funds, but we can also come in when it comes to budgeting. When you start to put in a forecast, collecting invoices, and paying those invoices in multiple currencies, >>>

Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you have in place when you went to raise capital?

Josh McCarter: We had a functioning framework of the software. We had about 700 customers and a team of about 30 people. It was, at least, beyond a prototype and proof of concept. The business was doing under $1 million in revenue. We had a good reputation and had some big marquee contracts with Hilton and some other hospitality brands.

We leveraged that saying, “This is real. There are transactions happening through the system. We want to extend it to other feature sets to help these businesses run.” Salons started signing up. We thought we could make a dedicated product for salons so we started pushing out in that direction. We ended up building out the business from there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the use cases?

Mike Ward: Private clients today might be an expat living abroad for a few years. You might have a consumer who is studying abroad. We pay part of that tuition for them. They could be buying a vacation home. From a corporate perspective, they might have their own website. They might buy or sell products and services. That might be done on a cross-border basis. We would come in and facilitate that.

Sramana Mitra: Why do they use your service versus banks? What are the drivers? >>>

Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Josh McCarter: Around 2001.

Sramana Mitra: What happened then?

Josh McCarter: The company’s IPO was successful. After six years, I was looking to do something new. I went and joined a company called Spafinder. It was a travel-based magazine and was call center-oriented. We were trying to turn it into an online travel content company. We ended up joining with that team and worked on that business for a couple of years.

I ended up on the Board and decided to look up a few other business models. I connected with some friends in business school at USC. One of them had >>>

5 Thought Leaders in Vertical Cloud

We’ve been covering the Vertical Cloud trend extensively this year. The following in-depth interviews with five leaders in Vertical Cloud offer an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

• Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems – Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his mid-life crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, in 2016, will do well over $500 million in revenue and trades at a market cap of over $4 billion. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love this story.
• Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho – Zoho has been a tremendous success story in the cloud. During this interview, Sridhar Vembu discusses his strategy for the next phase of growth, and his general observations about the dysfunctions in the cloud ecosystem. A compelling conversation, must read.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First (Part 1)

In an increasingly globalized world, currency transfer is becoming increasingly digital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to World First as well as yourself.

Mike Ward: I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for World First for the global business unit. It was started in 2004. Jonathan Quinn and Nick Robinson were our two founders based out of UK. While working with a large financial institution, they saw the opportunity in the international payment space. They wanted to help service consumers and small to medium-sized corporations that faced problems in doing transactions and activities cross-border. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 1)

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

In 2010, SaaS investors were less rigorous than they are today about unit economics. Josh managed to raise a $15 million Series A and acquired a significant runway to figure out the metrics of his SMB-focused SaaS business. Read more about his journey.

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

Josh McCarter: I was born in Sacramento, California. I lived there till I was about 12. Then we moved down to San Diego. My mom’s family was an immigrant family from Greece and has a bunch of entrepreneurs. My grandfather and uncle on that side were very >>>