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Niche E-Commerce to $5M: Dan Dillon, CEO of CleanItSupply.com (Part 3)

Sramana: How much volume were you able to generate with search engine optimization as your primary customer acquisition strategy?

Dan Dillon: From October 2006 through the end of the year, we did a whopping $30,000 of business. In 2007 we did $300,000 of business. In 2008 we did $600,000 of business, and in 2009 we did $1.2 million of business. In 2010 we did $2.2 million of business and in 2011 we did $3 million of business. Last year we did $5.4 million of business.

Sramana: Between 2007 and 2011, did organic search remains your primary customer acquisition strategy?

Dan Dillion: That accounted for the majority of our business. We did try an affiliate marketing program and failed miserably at it. It came close to killing our business. >>>

Niche E-Commerce to $5M: Dan Dillon, CEO of CleanItSupply.com (Part 2)

Sramana: Was the premise of CleanItSupply.com to sell cleaning supplies to companies like your family business?

Dan Dillon: Yes, we wanted to sell to janitorial services companies as well as the suppliers of janitorial services companies. The experience I had in the trenches let me know my space and my vertical very well. I had touched and smelled all the cleaners out there. I had used most of the dispensers and products. I like to consider myself an expert in that space. I was taught from other business owners to stick to an area you know, so I decided to dive into that space. >>>

Niche E-Commerce to $5M: Dan Dillon, CEO of CleanItSupply.com (Part 1)

Dan Dillon is the founder and CEO of CleanItSupply.com. He was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. After completing his studies, he worked in his father’s janitorial supply business and helped grow it from 18 employees to 150 employees before the company was sold. Today his niche e-commerce site, CleanItSupply.com, has revenues in excess of $5 million annually.

Sramana: Dan, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

Dan Dillon: I was born in the suburbs of Philadelphia in 1972. I grew up in a family business and graduated from high school in 1990. I did two years at a community college to fulfill my mother’s desires for me to attend college. I was offered a scholarship to go swimming at a four-year school, but I turned it down because I did not want to spend four years with my head underwater. I wanted to go work in the family business. >>>

How to Sharpen Focus and Own a Market: Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain (Part 7)

Sramana: Your goal is to become a billion-dollar company. It sounds like one of your primary strategies for reaching that goal is the introduction of new products.

Omar Hussain: Absolutely. There are a lot of problem areas in healthcare right now. Things like secure printing, secure electronic information exchange, electronic prescription authentication, and patient identification are all unsolved problems. Our customers are prestigious hospitals, and they come and tell us what the priorities are. My biggest problem is not a shortage of ideas, it is doing it fast enough to keep our client hospitals happy. >>>

How to Sharpen Focus and Own a Market: Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain (Part 6)

Sramana: Did you take a major hit in 2008 that drove this decision?

Omar Hussain: We slowed down on growth. In 2008 we ended at $18 million, and in 2009 we only grew 10% to $20 million. The market had shifted slightly. We did not raise money because we already had capital. Once we decided we wanted to go into healthcare, it was all about focus. We had to go all into healthcare or rebuild the business cross-industry. In 2009 we really went into healthcare. In 2010 our business grew 30%. The following year it grew 48%. Suddenly we were profitable again. Last year we ended up hitting $54 million in revenue, of which 80% came from healthcare. >>>

How to Sharpen Focus and Own a Market: Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain (Part 5)

Sramana: Who was your competition?

Omar Hussain: We had a lot of other software-only competitors that were directory centric. We were the only solution that was packaged as an appliance that did not require a directory service, so from that perspective we had no direct competitors. We had an application profile generator which was a drag-and-drop mechanism for enabling a mechanism for single sign-on. We took our authentication technology from our heritage IP, which meant we had one solution that could manage log in to all applications with a single authentication, be it finger or card. People love that. We automated a huge problem. Nobody else on the market could do that. >>>

How to Sharpen Focus and Own a Market: Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain (Part 4)

Sramana: What steps did you take in terms of process to achieve that rocket in sales?

Omar Hussain: Philosophically, I have always believed that people ask the wrong questions when they talk to customers. They always try to sell them the idea. Most human beings who are being sold something based on an idea will give feedback that is not necessarily correct. This is particularly true if you are not spending your own money.

When we started talking to customers, we identified the sweet spot of the problem. There were existing products on the market, so we asked our customers why they were not using other products if they had such a big problem with single sign-on. They would give us reasons why other products fell short of their needs. We built our product, literally, but ensuring that it would satisfy the outstanding customer requirements. >>>

How to Sharpen Focus and Own a Market: Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain (Part 3)

Sramana: The terms for accepting the term sheet involved your joining the company. Did the founders stick around after you came on board?

Omar Hussain: There were originally two co-founders. One left and the other, David, remained. He is still here today, and he is essentially my partner. We got funded and within four months we went back to the investors and told them that finger biometrics was not as big of a market as everybody thought. However, we did inform our investors that there was another market for automating passwords for users. People did not want to remember so many different passwords, and they were more enthralled about central sign-on than they were about finger biometric authentication. We wanted to use the money we had raised to invest in building a single sign-on solution. >>>