Featured Videos

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The competitors who went away, were you winning their customers?

Matthew Calkins: We were winning the deals that they attempted to compete in.

Sramana Mitra: But people were not switching necessarily.

Matthew Calkins: By and large, whoever has done that installation doesn’t want to do it again. They’re going to hang on to whatever they’ve got until it dies on its feet. We weren’t able to go back to lost deals and win them the second time around, at least not in the near term. We were stronger proportionally in the new deals. They had this turmoil going on.

Sramana Mitra: We are talking 2012? >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. So you closed the $10 million round before the financial crisis on a questionable business plan. What happens next?

Matthew Calkins: It’s an odd journey. Now we have $10 million and we could be strategic. That felt very nice because there was so much we wanted to do. We’ve always been an ideas company and we had such plans. Finally, we had this moment to breathe and invest. The thing we decided to build was an exceptionally simple and elegant interface. This stems from our belief that BPM is hobbled by its complexity.

Processes should be simple and if they’re not, people won’t participate voluntarily. If they don’t, then only the people whose job it is will ever be a user of BPM. I wanted BPM to be an easy, attractive, and unifying experience whereas it was an exclusive, irritating, and dis-unifying experience. The first thing we did when we got this money is begin to develop what we called the Tempo interface. >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers were you able to get in 2004? How were revenues scaling?

Matthew Calkins: I think we were growing at about 20% to 30% in those years. Our customer gain was never what we wanted but still steady and lucrative. In fact, we didn’t have a growth problem until 2008 when we were investing hoping for better results. Then we hit a few problems. We had a version that had a lot of technical problems. We were in crisis mode with some of our customers.

At the same time, the market was proving to be uninterested in buying. We had just a confluence of some difficult factors for a few years leading up to that. We had felt that we were spending all of our money being tactical and none of it to break out strategically. I think this was really the core problem. Our competitors were successful at forcing us to play against their strengths. They would have some features. They would all agree on it and build the same thing. They would convince the analyst that this was the feature you needed. This was the thing that they’d be talking about at conferences. >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Matthew Calkins: 2003. There was a long transition and it was difficult for us. BPM naturally needs an interface in which you can consume all of the information that goes with it. You might need broad awareness and a portal interface would be good for that. You may need lots of pieces of information to synthesize a decision. Furthermore, that information needs to be targeted to you. So we said, “We’re going to get into BPM, but we’ll call our offering not just BPM but a BPM suite because these other things are synergistic enough for you to buy a suite around BPM and not just the core product itself.” We had to say that because all we had was the suite. We didn’t have the BPM in the middle. >>>

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The money that you had in the convertible note and your own money, that was financing 2010 then?

Ray Grainger: It got us through 2010. It actually got us almost through 2011 as well.

Sramana Mitra: In 2011, you generated revenue?

Ray Grainger: Yes. We got up to a million dollars in 2011.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012? >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking 2001?

Matthew Calkins: The Army project started in 2001. It got going in earnest in late 2001. We were still a portal company in the 2002 to 2003 timeframe. We had to get out of it. The portal market was, in the end, just as disastrous as the personalization market for different reasons.

Sramana Mitra: Why was that?

Matthew Calkins: There were a couple of problems. The portal was a feature and not a complete product in the eyes of the market. The portal was a great way to gather users and acclimatize them to your system, but the way companies want to make money on it was to give the portal away and to make money on all the applications that went along with it. >>>

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in terms of going and trying to recruit the next set of projects? Did you then go out to find projects that are in line with those people’s expertise?

Ray Grainger: We decided to take a different path. The thousand people told us, “We really like your concept. It’s much bolder and broader than anything we’ve ever seen. What we’re used to is BaseCamp and then FreshBooks to do invoices.” They had 8 to 10 different tools and they couldn’t tell how their business was performing and they wanted it all in a single place. We set off to build the depth. We built the very specific depth that these companies needed. In order to recruit the service providers, we marketed to them with this fantastic toolset to run their whole business.

Sramana Mitra: You basically gave them the platform on which to run their business and have them bring their clients on to this platform. >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pause for a moment. I want to ask a few questions about your survival. Were you bootstrapping this company or were you funded? How did you manage to survive this pivot financially?

Matthew Calkins: Our cash flow was quite strong. We were running a services business. We were doing a little bit of intellectual property, but mostly we were just developing that and selling it on the cheap in order to make money on services. We were also doing a little bit of analyst work in order to establish our bonafide as thought leaders in personalization. We had the Appian personalization report that sold for $20 to $30. We sold a few copies of it. It made us look like we were the thought leaders. Our cost structure was very low.

Sramana Mitra: Services means that, at least, you had cash coming in. When you pivoted, it was more of services work, right? The portal was more services, right? >>>