Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 4)

Sramana: So you really focused on selling to clients who had a workflow or process improvement need? Was any of it regulatory based?

Tommy Petrogiannis: Yes. We got very lucky in 1996 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon ended up buying an enterprise license from us and they standardized on our product. Back then there were no e-signature laws in place. There were no laws that would support legally binding agreements using e-signatures. This is also why we went after ISO 9000 shops. People would ask us if our signatures were safe and legal, to which we would reply that it was safe and that it was not illegal. Once the Joint Chiefs selected us it gave us a seal of approval.

Sramana: How did you get into that opportunity?

Tommy Petrogiannis: Dumb luck. It was a manufacturer of light pens that brought us into an opportunity. They asked us to be in DC in 2 days. They paid for our tickets to DC and we went straight to the Pentagon. That is not what we expected. It was initially for staff actions, which is anything that needed to go up to the President for approval. There were 30 Chiefs that would have to sign off on actions and that was a real big commitment for them.

All of those decisions were happening on paper. It was taking a long time and they wanted to do this electronically. I was ready to give the product away to get a reference account of that stature. Their use cases were pretty complicated and we had to work through various requirements that they kept bringing up over the next few months. We kept doing revisions and prototypes over that timeframe and after servicing that account so well, they turned around and bought an enterprise license. It became our single biggest deal in that calendar year.

Sramana: What was the size of that deal?

Tommy Petrogiannis: It was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sramana: Until that point, from 1992 to 1996, what was the financial picture of the company?

Tommy Petrogiannis: Very lean!

Sramana: Were you doing contract service projects?

Tommy Petrogiannis: No, we were selling product. We kept trying to get listed in magazines and gain publicity around the innovative technology. We had a shrink wrap product that we were selling for $150 a seat. You could buy it and install it like any client software. We got a lot of buys from manufacturing organizations and quality control organizations. We were going after those targets as cost-effectively as possible.

Sramana: What were your revenue levels like?

Tommy Petrogiannis: In 1992 and 1993 we were doing several hundred thousand dollars. We were having 25% growth year-on-year. In 1995 we got angel financing from local entrepreneurs and that allowed us to do proper marketing and hire a proper sales team. I learned a lot from my mentor who came from that round of angels. That really helped us get going.

Due to the Joint Chiefs buying our product we started getting a strong footprint in the US Department of Defense (DOD). All of the Commanders who run bases usually spend two years in the Joint Chief’s office first, so all of a sudden we started getting base after base coming to us asking for licenses for their entire base. We would get 5,000 and 10,000 user licenses at a time. That really helped us grow as a business and we became the standard in the DoD. In 2005 we culminated all of those pockets into a US Army enterprise site license for 1.6 million users. They automated hundreds of different business processes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis
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