Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the productization? What was the revenue level as a services company before you started productization?

Jake Weaver: As a services company, we had just over $4 million in revenue when the change started to happen. We had stepped into the product market, but we had made a smaller business solution.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you can finance this with bank credit lines and you don’t need a lot of equity financing, why would you dilute yourself?

You now have a company that is at $10 million ARR and this company is reasonably conservatively financed. You’ve put in about $10 million in investment to get to $10 million ARR, which means that if you were to sell this company to a larger player, you would get a very nice return on investment because it’s not an exorbitantly capitalized company.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The projects you were doing were basically SharePoint implementation projects?

Jake Weaver: Yes. Ten years ago, SharePoint was being used for a lot of stuff. People would build intranet networks on it. They would also build business process solutions on it. They would even build extranets with a public-facing side.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2016, you got a chunk of financing and you had over $1 million in ARR already. What happens next? What is the major inflection point in this business?

Tyler Eyamie: A big thing for us was hiring a Chief Revenue Officer and VP Marketing to help take that company to the next level. We wanted to find a better product-market fit.

Bootstrapping with Services: Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver (Part 1)

We continue our coverage of bootstrapping using services.

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?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It was basically content marketing and search engine optimization that you used to get that traffic. 

Tyler Eyamie: That is correct. That was a great way to summarize my answer. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you do in your first year? In terms of business models, pricing models, average sales price, what kind of assumptions were you working with at that point when you got the product to market and started selling?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to launch this product?

Tyler Eyamie: I have a champagne bottle cork in my office that says 11/11/11. It was November 11, 2011, when our first viable product went into the market. That was a humbling experience.

We put it out very quickly thinking about the fundamentals that Steve Blank preaches about the minimal viable product. We were fortunate enough to get our first paying customer early in December of 2011 that year.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double click down on the ecosystem and the competitors, because at this point, there were other billing software products in the market. I know this market well.

What products did you look at and what did you consider as competition? What was the competitive position with which your thesis was to go into this market?