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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 5)

Sramana: When did you start to compete for deals in the United States?

Paulo Rosado: I think we started our efforts in late 2007.

Sramana: How much European business were you doing by then?

Paulo Rosado: We were doing quite a bit of European business. We had less than $10 million in revenue when we entered the United States. At that time, we went through a painful transformation in our company as we migrated towards a subscription-based business model. We basically flattened our revenue.

Sramana: Did you make your existing European customers transfer to that perpetual licensing?

Paulo Rosado: Yes, it was a multi-year process. It took us about four years before we had the install base converted. >>>

Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 1)

Everything is moving to the cloud and hotels are no exception. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Ric Leutwyler: I was born in Austin, Texas. I have moved 18 times in my life and career in the US. I have a double degree in both Marketing and Human Resources as I had interest in both areas. I started my career with AT&T before the divestiture. It was one of the largest companies in the world. I was involved with different parts of the organization during my time there. I think I was in eight different roles in eight and a half years. >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 4)

Sramana: It sounds like you were showing substantial revenue by the time you finished your product and got your second round of financing.

Paulo Rosado: I did not take another round of financing until we were at the breakeven point. The original intention was to go to the market at the end of 2002 and get another $4 million to support sales and marketing. However the bubble burst, so all money closed up, especially in Europe. We had to change our business plan and tighten operations. Our primary market was telecoms and they stopped spending so we had to switch back to the enterprise.

I don’t know how we did it, but we managed to slowly overcome the burn rate until a point where we made it into the black. We started growing in the enterprise and that is the market that brought us to the breakeven point. Once we hit that point, we brought in our second round of financing. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you describe the value proposition of what you’re delivering to your customer base today?

John Sundberg: Generally speaking, most companies already think that they’re all messed up internally and it’s very hard for them to get something done. They already see the pain. What we do is we come in and say, “For these internal processes, we’ve got a system that is straightforward to create forms that people fill out and workflow processes are structured so that requests don’t get dropped. It is automated and you get visibility to it at all times. In a general sense, the average employee makes at least 10 requests a year. With our automated software, they save $10 per request. That’s savings of $100 per employee per year. If you take a look at a company with 5,000 employees, that’s savings of $500,000.”  >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 3)

Sramana: I know you had experience developing software and you knew the change process. You had a basic understanding of the problem domain. As you were building the company, did you bring together a set of customers to work with as you were developing the product?

Paulo Rosado: Fortunately we did, yes.

Sramana: What was that process like?

Paulo Rosado: We followed the rational process of trying to build something that was not going to be very specific to just one customer. We had a good product management process going on, yet at the same time, we were constantly evaluating early releases with a couple of the large customers that were committed to evaluating it. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ramp of the company? You said you did $100,000 and then $250,000 in the second year.

John Sundberg: We were doubling every year for about six years. Then it went flat for about five years during the economic slowdown. Last year, we did $7.5 million and the year before $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: You have not taken any financing? This is all bootstrapped, right?

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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 2)

Sramana: Did the company go public?

Paulo Rosado: We were on the path right as the bubble burst. We were supposed to float on the NASDAQ, but we missed the window by about two months. We had to delay the IPO and it never actually happened. I left the company in 2001 with the idea of creating OutSystems, which we started in March of that year.

Sramana: What was the concept behind OutSystems?

Paulo Rosado: It was based on my previous Internet infrastructure company. In the first company we started working on a web application that was supposed to be deployed to thousands of users. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the project on time and on budget. That irritated me to no end. We kept going back to try and figure out why those projects were so flimsy and so shaky. We tried to improve our requirements analysis until we could make it work. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you have in terms of the content team? How do you run your content production farm?

John Sundberg: We have consultants and developers. We have product marketing managers. Those are all internal people that we have. We probably have a handful of customers that have done a couple of things too. They might create a piece or we will work with them to create the piece. Then we have an external marketing group that does, quite frankly, a fair amount. When I say a fair amount, what I mean is we’ve been working with them long enough for them to be a part of our company. Therefore, they know our company very well. They know our situation quite well. It’s pretty easy for them to create content that’s relevant, on-message, and accurate.

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