Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 1)

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

This is a terrific story of a team that has tremendous expertise in building and acquiring customers for consumer apps, and how they applied that unfair advantage to disrupt a domain (insurance).

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?

Karn Saroya: I’m a Canadian living in Silicon Valley. I was born in Canada in Vancouver. I was born and raised there. I went to Queens and eventually MIT. >>>

Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution? Is Boston engineering?

Spencer Pingry: The Engineering team is split between Boston and Virginia. It’s pretty even right now. All of our sales and marketing and CS employees are in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: You now started getting your team more organized in terms of functionality. What happens next?

Spencer Pingry: We’ve been in growth mode for the last 12 months where we’ve been scaling quite quickly. >>>

Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 4)

Spencer Pingry: In early 2016, we decided to launch a freemium product. We offered our entire product for free primarily to get as many interactions with as many customers as possible in the shortest time possible. For about five to six months, we hired some new go-to market people. We did a ton of SEM and spent a ton to really figure out which set of people we can get through the door.

We probably did 250 to 300 integrations in that short period of time. >>>

Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Chronologically, where are you at this point?

Spencer Pingry: Around the end of 2013.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the market now for a year and a half?

Spencer Pingry: For the first portion of it, the company’s name was Voodoo Lunchbox. As we went out to look for funding, we raised capital from a venture capital firm. At that time, our evaluator was somebody who was also incubating this idea. We ended up joining >>>

Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning and tell me how you got the platform built and how you got to the 10 to 15 customers. That is one of the most important parts of the story.

Spencer Pingry: Having been at Netezza, me and one of the other guys had spent a lot of time working with digital media companies and different companies that had this problem. We built the platform by consulting with some of these large news sites.

We built it on our own. We bootstrapped the first part and then we got some seed funding from some individuals to build the platform. Then as we started to develop the interface on top of this platform, we were doing things like funnel-based analytics, basic reporting, >>>

Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 1)

We love companies that have roots in off-center geographies. Zaius started in Virginia, raised capital in Boston, and has grown to ~500 customers with a $24k average ARR per customer. These are healthy metrics, and for the team in Virginia, accomplishments to be proud of.

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?

Spencer Pingry: I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. I lived there for the first 24 years of my life. I went to the University of >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: One of the questions that comes out of that is what role do you have in showing or not showing products. Does that mean that you’re operating a marketplace of what brands influencers show?

Cooper Harris: Yes, in a sense. It’s able to predict what product to show to whom. We are able to do that now.

Sramana Mitra: You have to recruit the influencer or the brands are recruiting?

Cooper Harris: The brands and the influencers are both our clients. They’re our customers who pay to promote their own products. They’re both on the same side. >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Cooper Harris: Hiring. We went out and we hired really fantastic folks. At first, you, as a founder, are forced to draw upon your own circles of awesome people you know. We were able to get one of the heads of design from Yahoo!. That was very cool. It allowed us to up the game. We mainly hired engineers, product, and design.

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing sales?

Cooper Harris: Me and two team members. It was a lot of work. We also felt really strongly because now the platform had grown to >>>