Harvard Business Review Series on the Seed Capital Gap

Crowdfunding Startups: Opportunities and Bottlenecks

There has been a bit of action for a while now in the crowdfunding world, and certain startups have been able to get themselves off the ground using the Kickstarter / Indiegogo style sites. By and large, these types of financings have gone to companies that are building physical products, digital games, etc. Fundings have also happened for some causes, films, books and art projects that are typically not businesses. Equity crowdfunding has been signed into law in the US through the JOBS Act, but it awaits the SECs directives on the precise rules governing the system. In Europe, it is legal and already in practice. Hopefully, other parts of the world will also start seeing the infrastructure develop shortly.

For our domain of focus, the primary concern is financing digital startups: technology and technology-enabled services. Typically, these are difficult to assess, high-risk companies, and amateur investors from the “crowd” are unlikely to be able to perform adequate due diligence to have a sophisticated investment thesis.

However, there is one category of investors who will have an excellent vantage point from which to assess new ventures.
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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In that strategy, were you actually partnering with Salesforce and going to market through the AppExchange?

Brad Peters: We were. Salesforce is a fairly hands-off partner. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge help. That has generally been my experience talking to other people. You find Salesforce customers on your own and tell the story to them directly. AppExchange was a nice technical integration point. It wasn’t that great a marketing tool.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard big feedback on that. Some people have been very successful generating leads out of AppExchange and some have not. It sounds like in your case, it has not.

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what happens after you did the reset. What was your go-to market strategy with the new horizontal product?

Brad Peters: We had to sit down and figure out what the go-to market strategy was going to be. There was a lot of experimentation. We couldn’t make our enterprise product available to everybody from day one. So we had to pick a small piece of it and make that available. It was not able to satisfy the entire market. We had to find little pieces of that marketplace that we could grow, expand, and drive. We tried a lot of value propositions – some of which worked, many didn’t. Ultimately, as we kept building the product and getting it richer and more robust, we continued to put more enterprise capabilities into the product. As we ultimately got those enterprise capabilities into the product, we started to compete in that main market. It was late 2010 when we really nailed it and things started to click. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your original estimate of the TAM for your application in the financial services area? As the market was shifting, what did you estimate it down to that made you explore other verticals?

Brad Peters: The TAM for each application was probably $100 million. It had to be $100 million to get into it. The idea would be you could find multiple of these $100 million segments. We weren’t sure, but we figured that there are roughly 100 financial services institutions and 150 to 200 minor ones. If we could get a reasonable percentage of them, we’ll probably hit 50% of the TAM, or about $50 million. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the seed that you got enough to get you to the next milestone or did you have to raise?

Brad Peters: We raised seed financing before we started. We couldn’t afford to make the mortgage payment without a little bit of seed financing. We got a little bit of seed financing from some VCs and paid ourselves next to nothing, just enough to keep the lights on.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of raising the seed money, what did you sell the VCs? What was the investment thesis that you sold the VCs?

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in 2005 when you started this company?

Brad Peters: We needed to do two things. We had to get some funding because we didn’t have personal savings to be able to survive very long. We needed some seed capital. We spent a lot of time thinking through markets where, with a single sale, we could get enough customer traction to fund the company for a period of time. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were at Siebel through that acquisition?

Brad Peters: No, I wasn’t. You could see the writing on the wall. Analytics was exploding. We were doing really well, but the rest of the company was not doing so well. It was actually shrinking. You could tell that the company was on a collision course with something else. It just wasn’t adapting to newer technologies and architectures. There were a couple of observations that came out of that experience. We had this analytics product that was doing really well, which was basically tackling the idea that normal business people in organizations need data to make decisions and that seemed to be something that was insatiable and was going to continue to grow for some time. There was huge demand for that. >>>