Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 1)

I spoke with Nick back when Gainsight was very young. Much has happened since. This conversation catches us up on the interim years since 2013.

Gainsight recently raised money from Vista Equity at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 7)

Ben Hodson: What we realized is that customers coming to us were for customization and choice. Because we’d built the software to be so customizable with all these integrations, we now had a full product solution that we could start scaling. We saw tremendous growth in 2018. We did over 100% in our growth. In 2019, we were just skyrocketing.

In June, we hit a wall and had three months of negative growth. That was scary because it had never happened. We had become profitable back in 2015 and we were running the company at a good clip without outside investment. It was scary to have negative growth numbers. We didn’t know what was going on.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 6)

Ben Hodson: By the end of 2013, we were in a position where these guys would say, “Hey, we would pay for this. This is better than a lot of stuff out in the market.” We decided to take the money that we earned on our latest project RepeatSys. We had about $50,000 each. We were going to put it in JobNimbus to feed it with our own money and then sell off RepeatSys, which we basically sold at cost.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What period of time did you do that mode of existence of doing consulting to pay down your debt? 

Ben Hodson: That was from about 2008 to 2012. During that time, I started a bunch of smaller companies that tried different things, but I made most of my money off of consulting. None of them went anyplace. They were ideas that weren’t to fruition. I think the big mistake that I made there was trying to run three or four different things at the same time.

Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That means that you now had to work with customer who had physical locations.

Tom Coburn: No, a lot of these were still digital brands. A lot of our customers do have physical locations too, but these were digital experiences you could do no matter where you were.

Sramana Mitra: What did that do to your business?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the 2004 timeframe when you were leaving this company. When you left, what did you do?

Ben Hodson: I had the entrepreneur bug. I was saying, “Oh my gosh, I really want to do another company, but I need to find a problem that I believe in and care about.” I was doing some consulting while figuring things out. At the time, eBay was popular. My wife was really into eBay. I started looking at eBay and there were several times that fraud had happened. PayPal didn’t really solve it.

Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after the pivot?

Tom Coburn: We try to not talk about 2014 to 2015 because they were very hard years. I remember the Board meeting at the end of 2013 where I said, “We have $1.7 million in the bank. We need to pivot this idea to something different.” Their first question was, “What should we pivot to?” I haven’t figured that out yet. Thankfully their answer was, “We invested in you and your co-founders more than we invested in a specific product.”

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you get the funding first before building the product or vice versa?

Ben Hodson: We built the product for the funding. It would not have gotten the funding if it weren’t for the product and the first customer. We had been raising money for a year and a half. I have probably done 30 to 40 pitches to venture capitalists and angels. No one was biting. They would say, “It sounds interesting, but I don’t understand encryption. Call me when you guys have something going on. I will be really interested.”

As soon as we closed that Verizon deal, that was when everything started to heat up. Everyone wanted to talk to us. It was easy to get meetings and we got much for favorable terms. We were able to pull a deal together about six months later.