Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2019? How much did you do?

Jake Weaver: That was the $5 million year. That was the breakout from where we had been before. For anybody that talks about valuations, a professional services firm is not valued as a product company. Even though revenue was staying the same, the value was increasing.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Just so you know, we have a whole methodology in our program around Bootstrapping Using Services. It’s something that we do a lot of in the program.

It’s something we have numerous case studies on. We have encountered what you’re talking about several times before. It works. I think you will go on to tell us that it will work.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the productization? What was the revenue level as a services company before you started productization?

Jake Weaver: As a services company, we had just over $4 million in revenue when the change started to happen. We had stepped into the product market, but we had made a smaller business solution.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you can finance this with bank credit lines and you don’t need a lot of equity financing, why would you dilute yourself?

You now have a company that is at $10 million ARR and this company is reasonably conservatively financed. You’ve put in about $10 million in investment to get to $10 million ARR, which means that if you were to sell this company to a larger player, you would get a very nice return on investment because it’s not an exorbitantly capitalized company.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The projects you were doing were basically SharePoint implementation projects?

Jake Weaver: Yes. Ten years ago, SharePoint was being used for a lot of stuff. People would build intranet networks on it. They would also build business process solutions on it. They would even build extranets with a public-facing side.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2016, you got a chunk of financing and you had over $1 million in ARR already. What happens next? What is the major inflection point in this business?

Tyler Eyamie: A big thing for us was hiring a Chief Revenue Officer and VP Marketing to help take that company to the next level. We wanted to find a better product-market fit.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 1)

We continue our coverage of bootstrapping using services.

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?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It was basically content marketing and search engine optimization that you used to get that traffic. 

Tyler Eyamie: That is correct. That was a great way to summarize my answer. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you do in your first year? In terms of business models, pricing models, average sales price, what kind of assumptions were you working with at that point when you got the product to market and started selling?