A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2016 when you were raising money. How much did you raise, from whom, and what were the metrics with which you raised?

Cooper Harris: Halfway through the year, we presented on the stage at a very large event. We got a ton of inbound interest from about 400 of the largest agencies in the world, which was such an eye-opener for us. After that, we did those Fortune 500 campaigns that I mentioned earlier.

Q4 was an awesome time for us. We had bigger clients paying bigger money. That is when we started to look to people for a fundraise. Most folks say don’t do it in Q4. I found it to be the opposite. Maybe partly because it’s a natural closing date. Secondly, as a >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long from there did you launch your MVP?

Cooper Harris: After we got the money, we built out the product. I guess it was an MVP. We didn’t put a ton of bells and whistles, but it was a fairly robust product. We took it to market. It worked well. It had to because of the folks we were doing campaigns with. It was pretty sophisticated technology. It took a little while to build.

In the pre-seed, I didn’t just take other people’s money. I invested all of my own at that time into the project itself. That was everything I had from my TV shows and stuff. I’m a very all-or-nothing kind perhaps. I feel that I only have a plan A, because if you have a plan B, there’s an option to fail. >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much money were you able to raise and what happened after?

Cooper Harris: Using that as a springboard, we parlayed that into a seed that was in the low millions. After raising a few millions, we were able to staff up. We were able to have a lot more resources. I should clarify that before this seed round, we had taken on a very small amount of about a couple hundred thousand dollars to make the tech more robust.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that from?

Cooper Harris: Angels. I can’t stress this enough for young companies. If you have a good idea, don’t disregard that early angel >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the concept that you started this around?

Cooper Harris: The reason I had it came from a very mundane moment. I was on my phone. I saw an ad for a really cute pair of shoes. I wanted to buy the shoes. I clicked the ad and went to the page but it took forever. Finally when it loaded, it was not there. It was cumbersome. It annoyed me. I eventually didn’t buy the shoes.

I turned to my engineer friends and said, “Did you see what just happened? This is so absurdly inefficient and also unnecessary. Let’s have an impulse buy button when we want to purchase something in a digital environment.”

Sramana Mitra: When did you start this? >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 1)

This is a terrific entrepreneurial story of a woman entrepreneur with no technology background who is killing it with a technology startup.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? What’s your background?

Cooper Harris: I’m from the southeast of the East Coast. I was born in Atlanta and I grew up in North Carolina just because my mom is a professor at Duke and UNC. I also studied at Duke.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your education? >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I know you filed to go public because we used to cover you before you got acquired. What was the evolution of that journey?

Jyoti Bansal: Companies can go public anytime from $60 million to $300 million in revenue. We filed when we were about $160 million in revenue. We were growing rapidly at that time as well. Our model wasn’t completely recurring revenues. It was mostly subscription revenue, but we had a mix of license model there.

Sramana Mitra: You decided not to go public eventually. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let me double-click down on a couple of things before we go much beyond. First and foremost, talk a little bit about your business model. The price point that you described – $25,000 per customer – indicates that you need to sell this product by telesales. Is that correct or did your average deal size increase significantly?

Jyoti Bansal: Average deal size increased. From zero to $1 million, it was about $25,000. By the time we hit $10 million, it was about $60,000 to $70,000.

Sramana Mitra: Even that is a telesales price point though. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much runway did you have to raise money at this point?

Jyoti Bansal: I had runway. I was managing the expenses carefully. Even though we had funding, I kept the team to less than 10 people until we got to the first set of customers. Once the first set of customers came in, I started bringing out sales and marketing teams. We launched the company out of stealth. We raised our Series B about six months after coming out of stealth.

Sramana Mitra: We are now in mid-2010?

Jyoti Bansal: Yes. >>>