Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about the New Zealand team?

Jason Westland: I still have them. They’re our development team. If you can imagine going back to 2014, it was just me and the development team. Now, I have a team of customer support and marketing people here in Austin. The development team in New Zealand has scaled.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of metrics? How many customers? Where you run rate wise?

Jason Westland: I believe we have 16,052 paying customers.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to change the one questioning a little bit, and ask you what your feelings are about being a woman entrepreneur in the technology industry. What are you seeing? What has been your experience? Do you experience bias against you being a woman entrepreneur?

Janet Kosloff: I wouldn’t say I experienced any overt bias but it was very difficult, especially that very first bit of money.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s true of every entrepreneur man or woman.

Janet Kosloff: I would say that I was asked by more than one potential investor when I was raising the angel round if I was ever going to hire a man because the team slide on my deck had all women on it. I thought that was an odd question because I don’t think anyone would ask a man if they were ever going to hire a woman. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: What is the minimum revenue threshold you think you need to get to achieve that?

Jon Ellis: My opinion is you need minimum revenues of about $50 million. However, plenty of companies especially in Australia, IPO at the level that we’re at now.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t think that’s a good idea necessarily.

Jon Ellis: It’s a disaster.

Sramana Mitra: Going public too soon is a bad idea. Based on the picture that you’re painting, $50 million run rate in the next three to four years is very doable. If you have a reasonably clean exit path into the public market in Australia, that sounds like a very interesting way to build a company.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 7)

Janet Kosloff: In the pharma industry, they tend to do these very long tracking surveys. They’ll do them quarterly or maybe every other month. They’re very expensive. Brands could spend many millions of dollars on these tracking surveys. They take a long time to execute each wave and it takes a long time to analyze the data. By the time that data is incorporated into the decision-making process, it could be many months down the road. We’ve introduced something called a Micro Tracker into the market where in a very short survey, a client can track their key performance indicators every month.

Some of our clients do it every other week at the very beginning of their launch. They could really have their finger on the pulse of those metrics that are very important to them over time. We’ve developed functionality that takes the friction out of that with things like the ability to be able to set it and forget it, visualize wave over wave data, and slice and dice the wave by different responder groups. Adding products such as that has also increased the average purchase because folks now have the ability to use our solution for more things.

Sramana Mitra: What about metrics in 2015?

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Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In 2016, have you raised more money?

Jon Ellis: We’re about to. We’re just raising now. We opened on Tuesday. We received a commitment from shareholders already for $3 million, and we intend to raise $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? Is this some sort of a stock exchange in Australia?

Jon Ellis: Because of the way we have structured our company, all shareholders have ordinary class shares. It’s still a private company owned by shareholders. Those shareholders have the first right to purchase more shares if they want to. If they’ve exhausted their allocation, then they can invite other people in the market.

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Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the 2012 to 2014 period, you were operating with a very healthy profit margin. How many people were in the company and how did it grow?

Jason Westland: That’s why it was so profitable. We had no marketing team at that time. It was just me. We had two full-time developers. We had one tester and one support person.

Sramana Mitra: It was a very lean organisation.

Jason Westland: That’s right. Prior to that, to build the product we needed a lotof contractors. The minute that we went live with the Gold version, we released all the contractors. We immediately became profitable. Then I paid off the debt. Once I paid off the debt, I reinvested the profit in growth.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of the growth strategies once you achieved that healthy mental peace state? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A bit of question about your sales cycle. At 2014, you’ve been in the market for a couple of years. You’ve got good reference customers. How did the sales cycle evolve?

Janet Kosloff: It definitely got easier to get appointments as we got some recognition and references within companies. If we would get a subscription in a particular brand, we would look for opportunities to expand from brand to brand and continue to expand our footprint within those clients. Because we had a bigger team, we had the ability to look in other places for prospects. That’s when we started to really attack the biotech market.

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Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2015, your entire strategy was focused on Australia, China, and UK?

Jon Ellis: It was. It was until we had our A round funding.

Sramana Mitra: I was actually coming to that. You raised money in 2015?

Jon Ellis: Yes, in the middle of 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about that.

Jon Ellis: We came to the realization in the early part of 2015 that we had a huge opportunity with our platform, but that huge opportunity needed quite a bit of money. We set about raising funds. We didn’t give ourselves enough time to raise money which was a bit silly. I was a bit naive and thought the fundraising process would be quicker than it was. We went out to users of the platform and other friends in the industry, and raised $2.5 million from 24 individuals.

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