Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There a lot of people trying to do the solution that you’re describing – this central electronic health record of a patient. Can you help me understand when you started this company, what was the competitive landscape like, and how has that competitive landscape evolved over the years as you have been in this business?

Philippe d’Offay: When we started, we invented Card Capture. Unbeknown to us, there were other companies who were, at the same time, coming up with the same idea. We focused on mobility. That was the key aspect of what would make us different against our competitors. On day one, there were no competitors. It didn’t seem like anyone was trying to do what we thought was a pretty brilliant idea, which was to get doctors to use a mobile device to keep track of their patients.

The first thing I learned about medical software at PMD and as I was researching was that there’s this general rule in healthcare that healthcare technology >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 1998?

Philippe d’Offay: You have to go back a little bit because the two questions overlap with one another. There’s a lot of news lately about medical errors. According to a Johns Hopkins, more than a quarter million patients die due to medical errors a year. In 1991, my grandfather was one of those who died unnecessarily. In 2003, my mother was one of those who died unnecessarily.

In between those two was this awakening that I’m focusing my energy and career on consulting with business, and here you have this huge dysfunctional industry with innocent people dying. I was very drawn. I’ve avoided healthcare my whole life. All of a sudden, I realized why I couldn’t do that anymore. My mother was diagnozed with an awful brain tumour in 1998 about a week after I started my consulting firm. It was good timing because I didn’t have to >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 1)

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Philippe has turned ~$300k of friends and family investment into a $6.5 million ARR business. Read on to learn how.

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?

Philippe d’Offay: I’m from the Seychelles Island. I was born in South Africa when my dad was going to veterinary school. My grandfather was the only private physician in Seychelles. My story goes way back to the conversations he had with my father about how medicine is changing and that it might not be a good thing for him to get into. He suggested that my dad become a veterinarian. >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the SaaS business.

Deal sizes are not going to be of scale. You’re selling software, so your average sales price is going to be a lot lower. The number of customers that you have to acquire is way larger, and people are not searching for freelance workforce management software. You have to find these customers somehow. How do you reconcile that?

Stephanie Leffler: The first thing is, from a price standpoint, I definitely recognize that a lot of SaaS platforms are relatively inexpensive. We have a slightly higher price point for our software because of the value that it does deliver. A customer who subscribes will be paying, at least, $100,000 for our entry-level >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork.

Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide a software that lets you manage them at scale.

Sramana Mitra: In this mode, what are the metrics of the business? How did the services business ramp up? How many customers and what kind of revenue? Once you switched a few months ago, what are the early metrics of the new format of the business?

Stephanie Leffler: We are so early with the new format that I don’t even have metrics that I can provide you. Our software went into beta two months ago. Our >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long have you sold the service?

Stephanie Leffler: We started in January 2011 – about five years.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about how this services business ramped up. Amazon was sending you people. You were managing their larger Mechanical Turk project using your platform. Did all leads come from Amazon or did you start marketing yourself?

Stephanie Leffler: In the beginning, all leads came from Amazon. We did start marketing ourselves. It’s funny. Thinking through the entrepreneurial journey, we found ourselves in a position where we never understood how good we had it in our first business with people searching online, finding exactly >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 4)

Stephanie Leffler: I remember Amazon called us about a year into this project and said, “How are you pushing so much work through Mechanical Turk?” We said, “We built this software platform to manage it, so it’s really easy for us to push a lot of work out there.” They asked us to come out and demo it for them. They were very impressed and said, “We’re trying to build a partner channel for this product. We need software providers like this to make our product more usable. Have you guys ever thought about going into business and selling the software?”

At that time we were like, “No, we’ve done the software thing. We’re in this thing now where you can just make money through advertising revenue. You don’t need to have any customers.” Two to three months later, we couldn’t get it out of our head. As our product got better and better, we thought that this is something that could actually impact the future of work. >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All this was organically built or did you raise any financing in this process?

Stephanie Leffler: We didn’t raise any financing. We’re both very happy at this point that we didn’t. It wasn’t really by design but it was more because we didn’t even understand that those sort of things were available.

Sramana Mitra: How were you doing customer acquisition?

Stephanie Leffler: We got very good at search engine marketing. In Google, we ranked number one for the term shopping cart, shopping cart software, and e-commerce store. Every day, our sales line was a queue. Sales people would pick up the phone as fast as they could. It was all 100% inbound from our rankings in >>>