Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you started in 2012, how did you get your business off the ground?

Mike Whitmire: When I started, I was just a senior accountant. I had no money. I had no entrepreneurial experience. My first line of thinking was, “If I’m going to start a SaaS company, I’d probably need to take venture funding to be taken seriously and get some early customers.” Heading into this, I was operating under that assumption.

Sramana Mitra: Which is, by the way, the common fallacy in the market. Everybody thinks that if you wake up and you want to start a company, you need to go out and raise money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth, but that is fallacy that the industry operates with. >>>

Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 1)

When Mike started FloQast, no one knew about Blackline or the account reconciliation opportunity. Although Blackline was already a sizable company, it was little-known, bootstrapped, and away from the public eye. Read how FloQast went for the same market, although with a different positioning, and achieved success.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Mike Whitmire: I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I’m a native to the city. I went to college on the East Coast. I >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to productize everything? When you got this $100,000 plus deal, was it already productized?

Mack Sundaram: We were about 70% there. It was something that they could implement right away and certain things that they wanted that I didn’t have, I agreed to build it out for them. It’s $100,000 per year deal by the way.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these customers did you get as you went along? What was the pace of building this business? How many customers were you getting a year? Of course, it’s additive because it’s recurring revenue. Tell me a bit about the trajectory and the ramp. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground?

Mack Sundaram: Being in a sales role, I had the privilege of having worked with companies. I personally have to find ways to solve this problem of blackbox sales. I used to experiment with different techniques. I hit upon something that started working for me. I went and talked to the people that I worked with.

I said, “I have a way where you, yourself, can solve your sales problems.” There were different kinds of responses. At the same time, I realized that people might not fully believe me because I was just one guy and connecting to them randomly. As I worked through a lot of these situations, I sharpened this process to make it even better. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you solve it precisely?

Mack Sundaram: That’s the company I started in 2015. Sales people talk to prospects every time. Back in the day, people would just believe that. Now we verify every deal with the prospects. We actually ask the prospects, “Do you feel that this is the right solution for you?”

Then we triangulate that with what the rep says. Then we have a much better way of finding out the truth of whether a specific deal is going to close or not. The nuts and bolts of it is prospect verification. Trust the sales rep, but verify the data. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 4)

Mack Sundaram: Professionally, I was working in sales, sometimes in direct sales or in supporting sales. All of that was happening on the side while I was pursuing these little things. Now we’re fast forwarding down to 2014 when I left my corporate job.  I was too passionate about technology and being an entrepreneur.

At the same time, I’ve got this amazing knowledge in sales which I can apply. I found myself very innately drawn to sales. Going back to what I told you before, my parents encouraged me to find something that I really like.

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to do in the domain of sales? How were you going to make a difference? >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 3)

Mack Sundaram: Exactly. There’s always that human psychology element that tells you, “Maybe you’re not ready. Maybe you should wait another year.” That was one side of the brain holding me back. At the same time, since I’d already tasted being in a startup situation a decade before that, the lure of that novelty was too much. I had to do it. As I was working in a corporate job, I had to do this on the side.

I did two or three more startups. They were fairly good. They were in education. Think about it as social networking for education. Right around that time, Facebook was becoming very famous. But then, we were using social networking to learn more effectively. >>>

Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I did a startup in AI 20 years ago. That was not when AI was really happening.

Mack Sundaram: There you go. It was incredible to get that opportunity. It was a great experience for me.

Sramana Mitra: You left the company, though?

Mack Sundaram: We sold the system to the Department of Defense. I went on to do my own startup using my own money. I went on to another startup, which failed miserably because I didn’t get certain things right. That was a very hard lesson to learn. As a graduate student and immigrant, I wasn’t doing well financially. >>>