Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The next thing I would ask you is what was the process of fundraising? Were you fundraising in Germany? Where did you go out to raise money and what was the thinking?

Gero Decker: We started getting inbound requests from investors pretty early on. We also got acquisition requests pretty early on, but we didn’t really entertain that. It became overwhelming in 2015. We had a feeling that everybody was reaching out to us. We didn’t need funding because we were profitable the whole time.

Sramana Mitra: You had a lot of revenue.

Gero Decker: We didn’t need funding to fuel the growth, but we realized two things in early 2015. One was, one of our co- >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This first customer went through. You got paid. What happens next?

Gero Decker: Then we started building a real organization. We hired our first sales guy. We went from a company that was four people with interns to 15 people over the course of 12 months. The interesting that we had for me as an entrepreneur is we had a lot of interest in what we were doing. Bloggers wrote a lot about us. Industry analysts wrote about us.

We had a lot of inbound interest, but nobody was buying. We thought that it was a strange situation to be in. You have all of these conversations but nobody signs. We later discovered that we were seeing the impact of the financial crisis. >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you got to May 2009, how many of these 20,000 people who looked at this became customers?

Gero Decker: Not many. The 20,000 people were not really interested in the notion of business process per se. They were rather interested in the notion of having a graphical design environment on the web. A small fraction of them actually stayed happy users. From this initial set of customers, we might have converted maybe 20 or 30 over time. They were just tech enthusiasts who just wanted to check out the technology.

Sramana Mitra: Did anybody convert into a customer? >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did the 20,000 people find out about it?

Gero Decker: We didn’t know how they had access to the system. We searched the web for our project. We found out that a major news outlet had blogged about us and wrote an article saying something like “This is the future of applications.” The reporter was raving about the new technology.

The system wasn’t for 20,000 people. It was an interesting insight that people were interested in our technology. We couldn’t really imagine that people would be interested in this from a use case perspective. This was more about being enthusiastic about the technology. >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 1)

Very few software companies have been built from Europe with a global footprint. I am about to bring you the story of one that is growing nicely.

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?

Gero Decker: I’m from a town in northern Germany. My father and my uncle were entrepreneurs. My uncle was one of the investors of solar panels. My father built high-precision bases for industrial manufacturing. I was the odd man out in the family who did not go down the path of mechanical engineering. >>>

Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There are two conditional clauses in there: 45 years old and having done that before. I would vouch to say that if you had done this before, it wouldn’t matter how old you were. If you had credibility and track record of having done a successful venture before, anybody will sign a term sheet. That’s the problem in the industry – first-time entrepreneurs have it much harder, which is understandable.

Mike Whitmire: The other ironic part of that is, I was thinking, “If I had a successful exit already, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now because I would have funded my own company.” >>>

Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about your financing strategy? After that $1.3 million you raised in 2014, what other financing have you raised?

Mike Whitmire: In 2014, we got to a good recurring revenue clip, and then I went back out to do our Series A. We closed $6.5 million in Series A funding, which was led by Polaris Partners. They’re headquartered in Boston but they have their software investment arm in San Francisco. Toba continued to participate. That was around when we needed the money to keep going and grow the business. That was incredibly challenging for me. I probably got a hundred no’s again. >>>

Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In B2B sales, we actually use a methodology that’s our own. We call it the Sales 2.0 methodology. We do email marketing and lead nurturing, which is basically funnel management. That’s actually a scalable and repeatable process. Investors like that scalability and repeatability very much. It works.

Mike Whitmire: It very much does. Fast forward three years, we now have a team of 22 BDR’s who are out there doing that same job.

Sramana Mitra: All on the phone right? >>>