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Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went to raise from this Manhattan firm with healthcare industry folks out there, what stage were you in? Did you already have a product? Did you have customers?

Bill Moschella: We actually did. By the time the raise goes down at the end of 2011, we had a decent customer base. We got a good handful of customers who were using it, love it and are giving great feedback. We actually had started to build modules and additional products. We were already in the process of cross-selling them. From an investor perspective, they’re like, “It seems like this could be a hot market. It’s starting to take off. These guys are selling quickly and as they build new products, their customers are buying.”

Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model of your product? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up with this? You were working with enterprise customers and requested this functionality? What was the process of coming up with this particular product?

Robert Castles: That’s a great question. We have been doing much of what our product is today in a more ad hoc manner. We were fortunate enough to have a technology partner who knew about what we did. They had a customer that had built an internal system that did a lot of what we do today. We did a call and they showed us what they had. It was beautiful. It was one of the best applications that I’d ever seen. They said, “We like the way it looks, but we hate this application.” I asked them why. They said, “We can’t do anything else other than exactly what it does. If we need a field on this form, we have to ask someone to do it.”

The light bulb went off. That has been what we’ve been good at for years. They basically showed us what we wanted to build. They actually didn’t end up becoming a client, but we went ahead and built what they had shown us. We signed up our first three customers shortly after. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get down to the specifics. We understand iteration. We’ve heard this many times. It’s part of our philosophy as well in terms of the methodology of how we train entrepreneurs. We are completely on the same page with you. Specifically, what were you selling? What was the segmentation emerging out of this process?

Dave Elkington: We built a lead management platform – not a marketing lead management but a sales management solution. We had all the expertise. We built a web database platform that was designed to help companies with, particularly at that time, web marketing-generated leads that they wanted to hand over to their sales team. We built automation tools for them like dialling, click-to-call, and emailing tools. A lot of the marketing automation that you would provide to marketing, we actually then took those concepts and applied them to salespeople and then built a platform that, most particularly, inside-sales reps would consume.

It was delivered on a per user per month basis. We just modelled it on other successful models. We were looking most particularly at Salesforce.com. We looked at their pricing. We were not really a competing solution, but we were a complementary solution. We felt that we need to be priced at a >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What form did the idea take? When you decided that you were going to build your own product, you said you observed the gap in the CRM space within the healhcare market, what format did this idea evolve into?

Bill Moschella: It evolved into what it still is today. We built a healthcare CRM platform that’s powered by analytics.

Sramana Mitra: Who is the customer?

Bill Moschella: Hospitals and providers. The story behind it is very simple. There’s a problem of rising healthcare cost. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did things progress from there? What’s the next major milestone after this?

Joe LeCompte: We turned from website development into custom development jobs—not so much of web applications, but more of dealing with local companies and helping them solve business problems. We worked with Delta Airlines and Kimberly-Clarke.

Robert Castles: We found that the bigger the problems were, the better we were at delivering. We realized that was our opportunity to grow the company, differentiate ourselves, and have sustainability in a future market.

Sramana Mitra: But you were still working in this services mode?

Robert Castles: That’s correct. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I actually have a BMW 3 Series that I categorically lease. I change them every three years.

Dave Elkington: It’s uncanny. Every time I give the example, there’s a 90% overlap. People cluster with other people who behave similarly. What I needed to build was a massive engine that collected all of those profiles of people. The epiphany came to me on how to collect this much data. It’s not a little data. The concept is I needed to know everything about everybody. If I know massive amounts about most people, I should still be able to predict the people I don’t know about and how they’ll behave in similar situations. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At what point does the strategy change? You described one strategic change which went from pure services to multi-year contracts and then to reselling other people’s software. What’s the next major change in strategy?

Bill Moschella: The next major change in strategy happened somewhere around 2007 where the reselling of original equipment manufacturing of other people’s software actually became more attractive than doing any of the services work. We became system integrators as opposed to doing agency services. We’re still doing some of the agency services work, but it was a means to get to the selling of the software. We weren’t selling our own software yet. We were selling other people’s software. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started PMG as a services company in 1997 in Atlanta. What happens next?

Robert Castles: We had some pretty good success. We went through the whole Internet explosion and the dot-com startup era. We built a lot of very neat websites for companies ranging from Mitsubishi Wireless with an interactive cellphone on a web page over to The Varsity in Atlanta, which was very exciting to have a local account to work with. Then, we caught wind of the digital marketplace explosion and things really took off from there. We had quite a bit of growth in this B2B marketplace opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: You were building marketplaces for other people?

Robert Castles: That’s right. We had a fiber market and a steel market client. They were trying to forge new ground in digital marketplaces and we were building web applications to meet their needs. >>>