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Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who were these thousand participants and how did you get them on the platform?

Ray Grainger: We started with our own network of people we knew. We come from a service provider industry so we have a lot of people in our network who are service providers in one capacity or another. Between the three of us, we leveraged 300 or 400 people who we knew or were connected to. As we did that, other people would refer and say, “I know somebody who might benefit from this.” That cascaded from there and it added about a thousand people over a two- or three-month period. From April through about August is when we thought that we had data points to really tell us where to focus.

Sramana Mitra: How did you transact? What’s the other side of the coin? How about the people who actually needed projects done?

Ray Grainger: We spent a little bit of marketing dollars in Google Ads. We did some PPC stint to draw in people who were looking for specific types of >>>

Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 1)

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

Matt’s first couple of bets didn’t pan out. The story is interesting on many levels, the pivots being two critical ones. Also interesting is how the company managed to compete with much better funded competitors and win.

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?

Matthew Calkins: I was born in Hartford, Connecticut and raised in California. There’s nothing particularly of interest about my background. I went to a public school. I was not a technologist but I appreciated technology growing up. That carried me when I started my degree though that was also not in Computer Science. I am an economist by training. I’m interested in technology because it is so impactful on society. It’s complicated. It’s fascinating but it’s also a way to change the world.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go for college? >>>

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the step-by-step journey of how you put all the pieces together to make this happen. When you quit InQuira, what was the first thing that you did? Who left with you? Who were the co-founders?

Ray Grainger: The co-founders were colleagues who I had met at InQuira. One is named Sean Crafts. The other is Roger Neel. Roger was a technical co-founder, so he had a very strong background in software engineering. Sean, interestingly enough, had a graduate degree in law. He was an attorney by education, but hadn’t yet passed the bar.

I had two very complementary partners, which I think was foundational to the success that we had. We had a technology co-founder and a practicing attorney. >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting and strategic from decision making or navigating this venture?

Mads Jensen: Our partnerships were very important. We work in an ecosystem where there are some big design firms and technologies that people already use. You may know Autodesk, which is a big software company. That’s one of our partners and that was extremely important for us. SketchUp is another partner. It’s owned by Trimble who ultimately bought Sefaira. Those partnerships are really important and without them, we would not have been able to grow in the way we did.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of business generation, how much business does Autodesk generate for you? What is the structure of the Autodesk deal? Is it an OEM deal?

Mads Jensen: As technology and marketing partners, they don’t sell our product but our partners have helped us in many situations. They help co-market and >>>

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You joined InQuira as CEO?

Ray Grainger: No, as Executive Vice President. They had already been around for five years. I was an investor and joined them as Executive Vice President. I was in charge of all professional services channels and helped them grow from $6 million to about $40 million.

Sramana Mitra: By the time Oracle acquired them, they were at $40 million?

Ray Grainger: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Did you go to work for Oracle?

Ray Grainger: No. My co-founders and I met there. We had got the Oracle deal going but we actually left just prior to the acquisition to start Mavenlink. >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It was 2012 when you launched the product. How did you do that year? How many customers were you able to bring on in 2012 after the first year of the launch?

Mads Jensen: We grew at an accelerating clip from 2012 and until the exit this year. I couldn’t say exactly how many users we brought on in the first year. It was more work initially because it was a commercial offering and we were very keen to monetize. We didn’t have a freemium strategy. It was more of an enterprise strategy.

We went out to firms and we wanted them to pay us a subscription fee. The first 10 firms was incredibly hard. They liked what they saw but architects are not big spenders. We had to convince them of the merits of investing with us.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging? >>>

Successful Pivot to a High Growth Business: Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You went to college in Southern California?

Ray Grainger: I did. I went to Harvey Mudd.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Ray Grainger: Based on that realization in college that I would pursue a career of applying technology to business, I went to Accenture directly out of college and ended up being part of the Products group there involving building technology and consulting in the high-tech industry. I had an 18-year-career there and ended up being a Global Managing Partner of the high-tech industry at Accenture.

Sramana Mitra: You stayed there for a while. >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept that you were working with while you were pursuing your one-year MBA at INSEAD in the 2008 timeframe?

Mads Jensen: Peter Krebs and I had a a lot of experience in software and technology and we both have worked in the construction industry. Peter is a Civil Engineer and my family had been in that business. We knew that there was a big opportunity within sustainability in the sense that buildings are responsible for more than a third of the carbon emissions.

They are a big part of the problem of climate change, but they’re also a big part of the opportunity. We can build much better buildings and that will really address that, but far too many buildings are not sustainable. We thought that it was a good opportunity. What if we could make buildings more sustainable. That was a couple of years after Facebook took off. Web applications were all the rage. >>>