From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money?

Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had popped up over the four years prior to my starting the business. We had a lot of traction with small business customers around the world. We also worked hard to make sure that they were having a good experience on the platform and encouraging them to leave reviews in the Microsoft marketplace or the Google marketplace and incentivize telling their friends.

As a freemium product, that helped us gain some early traction over some of the paid-only options in the market. I did feel that >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users?

Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had set a benchmark offering of $4.95 per user per month for an incredible amount of value. We felt we couldn’t go too much above that. We started off around about $12.95 per user per month.

When we started offering that to customers, we offered a higher level of support but not necessarily more features. At that point in >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, were you charging for the product?

Anthony Smith: We were not. Anybody could install Insightly and start using it. I was still at Perth in Western Australia. A lot of Google’s customers were based in the US which is a 12-hour time difference. A lot of stuff was happening in the middle of the night for me. My email system was blowing up. There were a lot of people inquiring about it, submitting bugs, and needing technical support and help. I was doing a lot of work from 9PM through to 6AM.

Sramana Mitra: How many downloads did you get and how many of these were active users? >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model.

Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing during the day. Some of them might use a computer for half an hour after they finish the shift or after they’ve finished with a customer. They’re not sitting in front a computer all day and using this software as part of the job. It’s more of an add-on piece that helps them orchestrate some of their activities. >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company?

Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining company. I spent about 18 months there and built that out. We got to the point where the mining company was really happy with it and started rolling it out.

In the history of computing, there have been about three really big >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)

Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story!

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

Anthony Smith: I was born in a very small town of Hamilton in the northern part of New Zealand. It’s famous for its cows and

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Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors?

JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our marketing. We have to be very ruthless with measuring our return on ad spend.

If it’s not profitable, it just doesn’t work. We have to constantly move and reevaluate where we’re spending our money. We started opening stores and we have to be more scrappy where we measure all these things carefully. Our goal is to make sure >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory?

JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends, social media, and doing some Google AdWords.

Customer service was critical to the whole experience. We did very well on that. We would follow up with every single customer and get feedback as to what they didn’t like. We used that to iterate on the product. That drove down our return rate and drove up >>>