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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

OJ Whatley: We currently have 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very good – 20 employees, $20 million in revenue.

OJ Whatley: Half of those are sales associates.

Sramana Mitra: That is my next question. What is the composition?  Half are sales associates, what is the other half composed of?

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 7)

Sramana: Who led your latest round of funding? That is a substantial amount of money to bring onboard.

Rob Hull: We had participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as participation from others such as Salesforce.com and even ex-CFOs who found this to be a compelling platform like Jeff Epstein who used to be the CFO at Oracle.

Sramana: What has Adaptive Insights achieved to date?
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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Regardless, in 2008 you were generating business at your own site. Talk to me specifically about your own site – developing your own site, business on your own site, the traffic. How much business do you do today on your own site?

OJ Whatley: Back then, as it is today, it’s primarily keyword-driven. Originally, it was all organic. It was a matter of getting as many relevant keywords in the title and in the top 10% that Google might scrape to have relevancy. I think one of the things that gave us greater relevancy and searchability was the fact that we were constantly putting up new inventory. That’s true today as well. Each day, we probably post five to ten new watches. There’s a constant new supply of inventory and content coming in.

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 6)

Sramana: One of the things I like is that the type of software you are selling has a lot of exit barriers.

Rob Hull: The important things to take away as an entrepreneur is that our product is sticky. Our software becomes an integral part of a business’s ongoing monthly process. We are a part of the closing process and have consolidation capabilities for financial statements. We can quickly tell CFOs what has happened versus what was expected. We can also look out at what has happened today and tell them how we think that will change things tomorrow and in the future. >>>

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said in 2006 you were doing $6 million?

OJ Whatley: Yes, $6 million – $500,000 in receipts per month.

Sramana Mitra: What was the inventory situation at that point?

OJ Whatley: I probably had closer to 50 to 80.

Sramana Mitra: That’s still out of your home?

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 5)

Sramana: How much money did you raise to start the company?

Rob Hull: We raised about $4.5 million in our initial round in late 2003.

Sramana: What were your milestones with that money?

Rob Hull: We wanted to get the product built, hire an executive team, and have a set of reference customers. That is exactly what we did with that round of money. We were able to hire our VP of Sales, we built out our development organization, and we garnered early customer support. >>>

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business was entirely Panerai until what year?

OJ Whatley: Until about 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after 2003?

OJ Whatley: Again, I’ve always loved watches. Panerai has captured my heart. In fact to this day, my license plate is Panerai. I fell in love with Panerai like no other watch. I love watches to begin with. It took me a couple of years because a lot of people were telling me that Panerai was a bubble. It was going to burst – that Panerai couldn’t justify the resale prices or the profit margins on the watches I was making.

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 4)

Sramana: Once you recognized the problem area, what were your next steps?

Rob Hull: Our goal with building Adaptive Insights was to apply the concepts of ease of use in a cloud-based format to really attack the space that Hyperion was in.

Sramana: Which specific problem did you go after as your killer app?

Rob Hull: The very start was around planning which encompassed budgeting, forecasting, and analytics as it pertained to looking forward in your business. >>>