Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though it was registered in Delaware, you were running the company in Denmark?

Steven Boye: You can say that the company’s engineering department was running out of Denmark. It’s actually the same today with Soonr. All engineering operations are done here in Denmark. All the financial, PR, HR, and business development operations are done in Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Are you the CEO of the company?

Steven Boye: No, I am the CTO of the company. Martin was the original CEO when we started the company. Initially, it was just the three of us.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that point when you were starting. You said you got funded right away. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What turn did the product take?

Brandon Levey: From a positioning standpoint, we had evolved to a real SMB solution. We would now position it much more as a multi-channel inventory order management solution for SMBs. The way that I like to think of the solution at the lowest layer is the management layer. It’s a small scale ERP for SMB. On top of that is an automation layer where we automate a lot of these business processes that are traditionally manual. On top of that, we started building out our intelligence layer.

Sramana Mitra: You were working with e-commerce merchants as well or just brick-and-mortar? Where was your sweet spot?

Brandon Levey: We’ve never just focused on one. That’s a very important part of what we do. What we like to say is we take a holistic approach to commerce. What that means is any way you can sell a physical good, we want to be a part of it. We want to be that underlying layer that makes >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does your work play in to the work of the SaaS providers like Aria? They are managing the online SaaS billing.

Christian Blume: They’re managing a broader spectrum in a much stronger niche market. What do I mean by that? They go into any type of service that could be a subscription, billable type of environment. Whether this is your utility bill or access to a cloud service such as a Box or a Dropbox, they can do all of that. What they actually offer is a very small subset of the solution that we actually have.

You are talking about an Aria system. They’re very specific and concrete around the subscription facilities and the engines that they offer around it. What they’re typically missing is any type of invoicing that’s associated with it. If you want to work with that kind of solution, you need to manage your own payment methods. You need to have your own fraud management and understand how international fraud has an impact on any type of solution that you have in place. You need to set up all of these different aspects to it in addition to the solution that they offer. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Specifically, what was that all about? What did you need to change in your style of operations?

Henry Albrecht: Since our product is about bringing culture to life and helping every employee improve, it has to be adopted at a pretty high level within the company to be successful. We needed the Chief Human Resources Officer, CEO, CFO, and others to be champions of the program. Are we hiring people who have the wherewithal and skills to get to that level? We have a Chief Operating Officer. That was a big step for us. We have a VP – Customer Success who came out of HR with 18 years’ experience. Those were just large executive, process, and technology investments. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It was a monthly recurring revenue though, right? It was a SaaS product?

Brandon Levey: Correct. It was the same model basically. In January of 2013, we hired Josh who used to consult small businesses. In March, we hired our first customer support rep who’s now a product manager at Stitch. That’s when things started to change. I like to joke that we accidentally started selling Stitch because Josh really liked talking to people. He’d say, “Maybe we should try calling our customers and helping them get set up.” When we did that, they would convert two or three times better. They stick around better. We started doing more and more of this. That just started showing a lot more initial traction. That’s when we actually started growing the company. >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Was it a very profitable situation right from the beginning?

Christian Blume: This is the interesting part. When we started the business, we always said, “We’re only going to enter actual business opportunities if there’s a win-win situation.” I would never have signed off on any kind of deal in order to buy market share and saying, “I’ll go in with a very low price just in order to win that business.” We always sold on the value we could generate. We would typically be always a little bit higher priced than the competitors out there. At the end of the day, what’s a percentage point in additional cost if you have a percentage point in additional revenue? It makes a lot of sense to do that and work through it. That’s why we always went into a very profitable situation with our client. >>>

Long Journey To Realize a Vision: Limeade CEO Henry Albrecht (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So in 2010, you got a couple of mid-sized customers. What kind of revenue were you able to get to in 2010? How did that correlate with your burn rate?

Henry Albrecht: We were still burning fast. We got past the million dollar mark in 2011. I think we went about a million in 2010. We raised our first institutional round in the fall of 2012. Our run rate was in the $4 million to $5 million range.

Sramana Mitra: About six years from inception, you raised your first institutional round?

Henry Albrecht: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Who did you raise your institutional funding from? >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said that until 2013, things were really cash-strapped but it sounds like you were picking up customers and that you were getting validation for your thesis at some level.

Brandon Levey: Correct. By the fall of 2011, we had about 60 customers. I think our total revenue was $500 a month. That was also when we started learning about venture capital.

August 2010 was when we did our first pitch. It was with Ann Miura-Ko, a partner at Floodgate. She’s a phenomenal woman. At that time, I think she was 8 months pregnant with her third child and she was taking this meeting as a favor. We got to the third slide on the deck. She cut me off and said, “No business has ever been able to penetrate the small SMB market. Give me an example of one that has.” I gave her of one that I thought was good. She said, “I wouldn’t exactly call that a big win.” >>>