Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 6)

Sramana: I have been noticing a trend lately. Companies are building very sizable revenue with small teams. The ideal example of this is FineArtAmerica which, when I spoke with them, they were doing $5 million dollars a year with three people. He had all sorts of outsourcing. You have 16 employees and are approaching $5 million. What is your growth dependent on?

Jake Weatherly: Without question, we can get significantly farther with our current team. Adding project managers is important because we feel that it is critically important to provide excellent service and hand holding in the implementation process with our clients. We primarily use a direct sales model, but we are getting more and more traction, which means highly qualified leads with short sales cycles, based entirely on word of mouth and industry adoption. When we get a key customer in a segment, then there are a lot of folks who follow. They keep a pulse on their competition and when an early adopter moves forward, then others follow.

We are also going to need developers. We work with a handful of contract developers, and then we have our core developers that are 100% dedicated to SheerID. It is very important for us to listen to our clients. When we sit down with a client and map out a customer experience, the light bulb often goes on over their heads. They then start talking about other market segments that are important to them. If we are talking about military discounts, then they might want to look at students or teachers next. Many companies start to introduce problems that they have with their own employee purchase programs or partnerships they have that allow employees under their partner umbrellas to get discounts. There is a balance between what we do now, what is on our roadmap, and where clients are sending us.

One particular client implemented a student verification program. After that was completed, they asked us if we had ever thought of verifying travel agents. It was not on our roadmap, but they explained a very painful process that they have to go through to allow travel agents to book hotels or cruises at very deep discounts. That was very interesting to us. We did the market research on that solution, and then we went out and looked for the authoritative databases in that world.

Sramana: Do you have to sell every deal with interactions? Is it an enterprise sales deal?

Jake Weatherly: We have two funnels. We have a high-touch, direct sales relationship pipeline. We also have built a library of plugins that are available for things like Magento and OpenCart. That allows engineering teams to come in and use our one-click integration function. All they need from us is a contract to turn on their commercial credentials. There are two very different sides of the house.

Sramana: What is the percentage split between those two areas?

Jake Weatherly: I would say it is 60% enterprise and 40% self-service. We have just started to dip our toes in the water of developer communities and library plugins. We have just started to build out our documentation in our API area.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId
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