Scott Dorsey: evaluation

Transcript context

…But I want to come back to that because – And I say that because as VCs, they’re sort of this like trope when you’re looking at investments in the enterprise that there’s this matrix of what your target customer is when you’re an enterprise and you’re a software company and who you sell to. It’s like a test. You need to have that nailed and it’s like are you enterprise, or are you mid market, or are you SMB? Do you sell direct? Do you sell via the channel? And typically, you need to have very clear answers to those. But it sounds like from the get-go you guys were like yes to all of those. Was that deliberate? How did you think about that? Great question, David. We were very small business focused. Very small business focused. In fact our first wave of customers were literally restaurants, dry cleaners, pizza shops. We were very SMB and very retail-oriented. The original problem we were trying to solve was that when the retailer turns their lights on and opens their door in the morning, they often have little visibility into who’s walking in the door and who their customers are and how to build deeper relationships. That was part of the background that Chris brought to the business. So early on, we were a $1000-a-year subscription and very small business focused. Actually, a good number of the reasons why those early VCs said no is they just couldn’t picture that this could become a large business. And then over time through I think being a crafty and agile and very sales and customer oriented, we started to realize – Actually our first wave of expansion was to grab lots of small businesses at one time. You need to start selling to franchise organizations. So we started evolving to franchise organizations where the franchisor carried a great deal about centralized branding and content but they wanted to give autonomy and authorship down to the franchisee. So we started to build kind of this parent-child relationship and this kind of enterprise architecture to serve franchise orgs, and that gave us a big boost. Then we started realizing that really every organization in the world is going to need to use email and digital marketing to communicate with their customers whether you’re a nonprofit or Microsoft and the enterprise side, there really were a common set of needs. We just built more and more sophisticated technology and then ironically, we were a Salesforce customer from the inception of our business. So we were students of Salesforce. We really watched how Salesforce built and scaled their business and we admired that they were a multi-tenant SaaS platform that served small businesses all the way up to large enterprises. I just fell in love with the idea that you could essentially build software once and sell and deploy it over and over again and that you could build features that could be – Every feature we ever built had a switchboard. We had an on and off button where we could deploy the software and package it in a really flexible way that was very simple for the small business or we could turn on all the advanced capabilities for the more sophisticated enterprise and have essentially one code base where we have clients paying a thousand dollars a year. We had a lot of seven-figure clients and even some eight-figure clients essentially using the same platform. That’s just a remarkable level of scale and flexibility. And there’s a lot of tension that applies to the organization around segmentation, who are you building products for, how do you build your services, or what are your support models. These are all the things VCs are afraid of, right?…

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