Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting and what’s worth highlighting in your entrepreneurial journey from a lessons from the trenches point of view?

Kris Duggan: There are probably a million directions we could go. One thing I would say as being very important is to be very focused as a company. I think we decided to be very focused on one thing, which is doing one thing extremely well and be the best on the planet around goal setting. That means that we had to rethink the product from the ground up. We had to rethink engagement and the experience.

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Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t really have any proof point yet. You didn’t have a product out. You didn’t have anything going. You just got a concept financing of $15 million from Kleiner.

Kris Duggan: The fact that I was in the process of having those 80 conversations and mapping the market was critical to the decision. Another critical factor was just how passionate John is about goal setting. He brought the goal setting process to Google. He worked with Andy Grover on OKR. He was already bought in to the concept. Just the fact that we were building a whole company around goal setting was very exciting to him and that’s why he invested.

Sramana Mitra: In October 2013, you’ve got $15 million in the bank. What happens next? >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You basically were putting embedded code on the devices for filesystem management.

Mikko Valimaki: Yes. Looking back, I think we made the right choice. We were able to grow really fast in the selected Asian market. When we were in the open source stage, I would say that from the early revenue, it looked like North America was the biggest one. Then there was significant revenue from Central Europe, and Asia was minor. When we went into the licensing business and figured out that the device market is the best for us, then Asia was really the way to go. Starting in 2010, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese started to handle the customer relations and develop the market further.

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe did you figure out that this was going to be your core strategy? Do you remember exactly when you came to that conclusion?

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Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a segment where you were finding traction from a size point of view or any other segmentation parameter?

Kris Duggan: I would say that initially when I first started the company, I thought this might be for companies that are not too big. Maybe if you’re a thousand or ten thousand people, you need Workday or SuccessFactors. What I found was that even these large enterprises have real, major challenges around driving adoption around goals.

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you highlight what was different in the commercial product versus the open source product? From a product positioning point of view, why would somebody who was interested in the open source product buy this one?

Mikko Valimaki: I would say there are three reasons. Some of our biggest customers were very hesitant to use open source. When we said that this software is no longer open source, there was more demand for it from big companies who didn’t actually want to share all the source code of their own product. We didn’t know about this kind of stuff. Then of course, we started to develop all the new features. It was technically much better. >>>

Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to Badgeville?

Kris Duggan: It’s still going on. It’s growing and moving forward. Once you have a founding CEO replacement, there’s a lot of turmoil brought in by the CEO that was brought in. Now, they’re on to their third CEO. Those kind of challenges can be very disruptive to a company’s growth.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of Betterworks?

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were they willing to pay if you had a good website and if you had a company?

Mikko Valimaki: We were able to get some of our very first money just by basically consulting and helping some of the first commercial users. For that, we improved the website a little bit. We tried to make it look like it was a company.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very different question. There are certain things that customers are willing to pay for and certain things that customers are not willing to pay for. The question I’m asking you is were you able to pick up that these customers were willing to pay if you were set up to look and act professional like a real business. >>>

Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after WebEx? Did you stay until when WebEx was acquired by Cisco?

Kris Duggan: I left right around that time – a little after the IPO until right after the acquisition. After that, I was invited to join a DFJ-funded company to run sales globally. It was called Social Tech. It was an early stage company that had about 20 people. That was my first sales leadership role. I did that for three years. I had a really good run with the company but I really wanted to get more involved in starting something and that’s what drove me to Badgeville.

During my transition, I actually ended up getting involved with a company called Palantir. Palantir, obviously, has a very successful track record and is probably one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley. I joined them when they were quite young and was involved in helping them think about their go-to-market and sales strategy. All of that helped me prepare to start my own company, which was Badgeville. >>>