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Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Great milestone. By the end of that year, you got the full $1.7 million in seed investment from your backers?

Jon Ellis: Correct. Next, what fundamentally changed the game was that we realized that there was a network effect. The agents on our platform looking for stock in Australia were also interested in stock in the UK, America, Thailand, Philippines, and all over the world. They also had exclusive listings. We realized that the developers were Australian-centric.

In other parts of the world, developers had much more of a global view. Then we realized that Australia is a small place. We needed to get busy. We opened a proper office towards the end of 2014 in China. We employed five people there. At the start of 2015, we opened our first office in the UK. We started doing exactly the same thing in the UK as we’ve done in Australia. The only difference was we started accepting products from all over the world and selling our technology into different developers in different countries.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about money? Hiring high-level people costs money.

Jason Westland: It does. I sold my first business. My second business was sold shortly after that. I invested all of the money from those two businesses. I then went and mortgaged the house. My mom mortgaged her house. I took out some credit card debt. It was really high-risk in those early days. I didn’t take on board any outside funding.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get a first version of the software out? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These are corporate accounts. You have to do an enterprise sale to get this to the purchase system?

Janet Kosloff: Our clients, being pharmaceutical companies, have a pretty onerous procurement process. Almost every one of our clients require, what they call, a Master Services Agreement. It’s a whole process and a thorough review that you have to go through before you could even accept a PO from them. Even if they haven’t purchased anything from you yet, in order for them to consider purchasing something from you, you have to get a Master Services Agreement.

Luckily, that’s something I spent a lot of time doing at my last job. I knew the process. I understood how to navigate that. We were able to get some of these Master Services Agreements pretty quickly. What that does is it gives you a license to hunt, essentially, within these companies. A company like Merck for example has many different brands and many different functional areas. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Then what happened?

Jon Ellis: Then someone that I had been speaking to for months, a very wealthy family in Australia, really liked the platform. They had been using it and they said, “We’re prepared to be backers. We’d have to make substantial changes to make some money, but we’re prepared to back you.” They invested $1.7 million in the seed round in a staged payment arrangement.

Sramana Mitra: What did they think you were going to do? When they became your backers, what was the agreement? What business were you proposing to build at that point? >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 1)

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

I have always said that you need to bootstrap your way to validation and traction. Jason did just that, and has built a robust company from New Zealand. Read on, it’s a fabulous story.

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

Jason Westland: That’s way back in time than I expected. I’m from New Zealand in the Southern Alps. My first job was managing a project of 25 people. I was 22 out of university. I was in project management until around 15 years ago when I became the General Manager of a software company that grew fast. I was inspired, based on reporting to a Board that I learned a lot from, to start my own business. This is the third business that I’ve started. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The customers are pharmaceutical companies?

Janet Kosloff: Correct. They are brand managers, market researchers, and M&A specialists.

Sramana Mitra: Was your MVP an app? How did you structure the MVP?

Janet Kosloff: We did not have an app originally. We have an app now but our primary tool is a web application that self-sizes for any sized screen. Most of our surveys are answered on small screens whether it be through the app or accessing the survey maybe through a text message or email invitation. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What market were you going after? Was Investorist focused on the Australian market to start with?

Jon Ellis: To start with, it was. Initially, Investorist launched as an idea of working just in the Australian market. As soon as I launched, I’ve probably been active for six months and then I realized that to make it successful, it had to go global and it had to go global almost straight away.

Sramana Mitra: What did you accomplish in the first six months? Were there enough transactions happening in your marketplace within Australia? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Janet Kosloff: This was 2010. I wrote the business plan in 2010 and I started to think about it. Once I was ready to take the leap, I left my job because I am very commerically-oriented, and I wanted to  find a co-founder that had more of the research and operations side. It was very important to me that I find someone to go on this journey with me because I’m a people person and felt that I wanted to be in this with somebody.

Diane Hayes, who has a background as an epidemiologist, was that partner. There’s a long story that includes a psychic, which I won’t get into. I told her about this idea and, literally, the next day after she slept on it, she said, “I’m in.” She and I decided to bootstrap the company out of the gate. We, each, wrote fairly large checks, put it in a bank account and set out to build the MVP with some software engineers that we hired. We’re not technical founders but we had very strong vision for the product. >>>