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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about the New Zealand team?

Jason Westland: I still have them. They’re our development team. If you can imagine going back to 2014, it was just me and the development team. Now, I have a team of customer support and marketing people here in Austin. The development team in New Zealand has scaled.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of metrics? How many customers? Where you run rate wise?

Jason Westland: I believe we have 16,052 paying customers.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 7)

Janet Kosloff: In the pharma industry, they tend to do these very long tracking surveys. They’ll do them quarterly or maybe every other month. They’re very expensive. Brands could spend many millions of dollars on these tracking surveys. They take a long time to execute each wave and it takes a long time to analyze the data. By the time that data is incorporated into the decision-making process, it could be many months down the road. We’ve introduced something called a Micro Tracker into the market where in a very short survey, a client can track their key performance indicators every month.

Some of our clients do it every other week at the very beginning of their launch. They could really have their finger on the pulse of those metrics that are very important to them over time. We’ve developed functionality that takes the friction out of that with things like the ability to be able to set it and forget it, visualize wave over wave data, and slice and dice the wave by different responder groups. Adding products such as that has also increased the average purchase because folks now have the ability to use our solution for more things.

Sramana Mitra: What about metrics in 2015?

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Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In 2016, have you raised more money?

Jon Ellis: We’re about to. We’re just raising now. We opened on Tuesday. We received a commitment from shareholders already for $3 million, and we intend to raise $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? Is this some sort of a stock exchange in Australia?

Jon Ellis: Because of the way we have structured our company, all shareholders have ordinary class shares. It’s still a private company owned by shareholders. Those shareholders have the first right to purchase more shares if they want to. If they’ve exhausted their allocation, then they can invite other people in the market.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the 2012 to 2014 period, you were operating with a very healthy profit margin. How many people were in the company and how did it grow?

Jason Westland: That’s why it was so profitable. We had no marketing team at that time. It was just me. We had two full-time developers. We had one tester and one support person.

Sramana Mitra: It was a very lean organisation.

Jason Westland: That’s right. Prior to that, to build the product we needed a lotof contractors. The minute that we went live with the Gold version, we released all the contractors. We immediately became profitable. Then I paid off the debt. Once I paid off the debt, I reinvested the profit in growth.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of the growth strategies once you achieved that healthy mental peace state? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A bit of question about your sales cycle. At 2014, you’ve been in the market for a couple of years. You’ve got good reference customers. How did the sales cycle evolve?

Janet Kosloff: It definitely got easier to get appointments as we got some recognition and references within companies. If we would get a subscription in a particular brand, we would look for opportunities to expand from brand to brand and continue to expand our footprint within those clients. Because we had a bigger team, we had the ability to look in other places for prospects. That’s when we started to really attack the biotech market.

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Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2015, your entire strategy was focused on Australia, China, and UK?

Jon Ellis: It was. It was until we had our A round funding.

Sramana Mitra: I was actually coming to that. You raised money in 2015?

Jon Ellis: Yes, in the middle of 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about that.

Jon Ellis: We came to the realization in the early part of 2015 that we had a huge opportunity with our platform, but that huge opportunity needed quite a bit of money. We set about raising funds. We didn’t give ourselves enough time to raise money which was a bit silly. I was a bit naive and thought the fundraising process would be quicker than it was. We went out to users of the platform and other friends in the industry, and raised $2.5 million from 24 individuals.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you started the company at about 2008 around the financial crisis. It took you nine months to get the first product out. The first product didn’t work. Can you put this in a timeline on when the traction actually started?

Jason Westland: It actually started in January 2010. We had, what we called, our Gold release.

Sramana Mitra: How many customer did you have in 2010?

Jason Westland: I guess in December 2009, we had almost 100% churn rate and less than a hundred customers in the system. It didn’t grow for that first year and a half. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When 2012 ended, what kind of revenue level did you get to?

Janet Kosloff: At the end of 2012, we ended up with about a million dollars in sales. That was our first full year in business. At that time, we ended up raising our small venture round.

Sramana Mitra: With which firm?

Janet Kosloff: The firm is called NAUTA. They are based in Barcelona, Spain, but they have an office in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in that round?

Janet Kosloff: $2.2 million. >>>