Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do your merchants have $100,000 in revenue or are they $2 million in revenue? Is there any kind of cut-off there?

Mitch Harper: Our customers’ revenue typically ranges from $1 million to $30 million of revenue per year.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base is more in the $1 million to $30 million range. Then, the customer base with revenue of $30 million and above goes to Magento and below $1 million is with Shopify and GoDaddy.

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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any geographical bias in the 2,000-customer base?

Mitch Harper: They were mainly from North America and Australia.

Sramana Mitra: Why were they pre-ordering? Why were they interested in your product? This is a segue into the discussion about your competitive landscape. There are a few players in that space. There is Volution, Magento, and Shopify. When you were starting out in 2008, what exactly was the competitive landscape? How were you positioning, and what is it that these 2,000 customers, who pre-ordered, found attractive? >>>

Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same team that you had in Sydney that got Bigcommerce off the ground?

Mitch Harper: Not really. As I had mentioned, I used to be an engineer and built the first version along with Chris who was one of our early employees from that initial team. He’s still with us today leading a team here in Sydney.

Sramana Mitra: Was Eddie also involved in Bigcommerce? What was his progression in this story?

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Deconstructing The Cloud – From New Book, Carnival In The Cloud

Excerpt from my new book, Carnival In The Cloud, on sale today.

At the turn of the millennium, a new form of computing swept over the world.

Netscape went public in 1995, heralding the birth of technology’s most exciting gilded age. David Einstein of The San Francisco Chronicle had interviewed John Doerr, General Partner of Kleiner Perkins, as he covered the incredible interest in the initial public offering of the Netscape stock, and the madness that followed.

Doerr famously said: “It’s possible that the Internet in fact has been underhyped. I think we’re witnessing the creation of a brand new medium that will possibly be more important than network television.”

Indeed, the twenty first century has seen that under-hyped technology trend boldly and assertively come of age.
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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 1)

We seldom see global software companies emerge out of Australia. Bigcommerce is a rare exception.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of BigCommerce?

Mitch Harper: I was born and raised in Sydney in Australia. Bigcommerce was also born in Sydney five years back in 2009 when I was about 27 years old.

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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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