Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 7)

Carl Ryden: Andi is every relationship manager’s dream analyst. She’s there with you in every deal. She sees what you’re doing. She sees your entire portfolio. She’s there with you to help you find ways to make that work better for the customer and the bank. How it came to be is, we had a great customer. The guy who bought our stuff and rolled it out is a guy called Andy Max. We were building functions and features and we would often find ourselves asking, “What would Andy tell the relationship manager?” One day, somebody said, “It would be great if we could just give everybody an Andy.”

So we built Andi. It seems silly, but it’s not. That idea was born a year ago. I can’t tell you how valuable that has been in the sales >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For the Series A investors, what did you tell them you were going to do? What problem were you going to solve?

J. Paul Haynes: I described to them the problem of solving cyber security in the mid-market. Everybody in the industry at that time appeared to be focused on the enterprise. We just have to sell to 50 of the Fortune 500 and the company is exit-ready is the standard business plan I was later told. The thing that drew them our way is we said, “That’s not who we’re selling to. Instead of the Fortune 500, we’re going after the 10,000 mid-sized enterprises in America and other parts of the world that have the same >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do and what model were you trying to reach?

Carl Ryden: There were a couple things that changed during that time. One is, the transactional sales people that we hired were not a good fit for our culture and how we operated. When we made changes, we wrote down our values. If you go to our website, you’ll see them. The quick summary is, “Be Helpful. Be Humble. Be Honest. Be Human.”

How those came to be is we saw a guy who gave a great talk on building company values. We were there just at this time when we >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before all this, it sounds like you started doing companies in ’76. I don’t think we have enough time to cover that long a story. It sounds like you have a background in enterprise security software. Could you give us a little bit of an idea about what you did before?

J. Paul Haynes: I did a Bachelors in Engineering and a Master’s in SCADA. During that, I started my first business. Upon finishing my Master’s, I already had a full customer roster working in the utility energy market. I basically went right into a job that I created for myself. I haven’t looked back. I think I graduated in 1991 from the Master’s. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You must have had a lot of relationships in that business since you were coming into this business trying to do something better than what you’ve done before. Did many of those relationships convert into paying customers?

Carl Ryden: Yes. We call them switchers. We get someone to switch from something they had before. It was good, but also not good. It was good, because you get money in the door and you get reference-able clients. It was also bad in that you never had to learn how to sell to new clients. It built in some bad habits. Eventually, we weaned ourselves off of switchers. I was somewhat against going after the switchers. >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

There are opportunities of building cloud businesses focused on mid-market customers, and many entrepreneurs are leveraging those to build compelling businesses. eSentire’s strategy is one worth looking at closely.

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?

J. Paul Haynes: I was born in Toronto. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto called Oakville. I grew up in a family of people studying >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I need you to step through the process of building this company. Let’s start by zeroing in on the concept that you and Ken agreed on, and how you came up with that concept.

Carl Ryden: We started with a general framework of building a business where it has primary value through its use. Inventory is evil and Ken learned that in the vacuum cleaner business. It was going to be a software business. It was going to be SaaS.

We wanted not just a SaaS company, but we wanted something that, through the use of the tool, would generate valuable data that could >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does the professional services group work? Do you have your own in-house voice people, or once you get the project, you figure it out and use the platform to recruit them?

David Ciccarelli: The latter. It’s the same platform and the same talent. The clients either don’t have the time or it’s the first time they’ve ever done this, or they might be a curriculum designer that has a hundred other moving parts. They need the extra support and bandwidth.

In the end, they’re looking for the same thing which is a professional quality recording delivered to them as an MP3. How they get >>>