Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 6)

Sramana: It sounds like the legitimacy of e-signatures for legal purposes really changed the entire direction of the company.

Tommy Petrogiannis: That really changed us as a company because we moved from within the walls of an organization to outside the walls of an organization. We gave them the ability to interact with customers without making them wait for paperwork or making them come into the branch.

Sramana: Which verticals are your primary adopters today?

Tommy Petrogiannis: We generated 70% of our revenue today from banks and insurance companies. The government generates 15% of our revenue and a bunch of other verticals are starting to rise up. Healthcare is the next big vertical that is rising up.

Sramana: What is the competition?

Tommy Petrogiannis: There are new companies popping up now but our primary competition is EchoSign and DocuSign. They are horizontal in the sense that they don’t care what they sign. They target broad markets. One of our competitors has listed signing birthday cards as a use case. We agree that it is a valid use case, just not for us.

We have a different strategy. We believe that where there is significant value, you will be able to avoid market erosion. We find that value in the regulated and compliance-driven markets, if there is a consumer angle in the market, that is where we want to play. We lead in those segments because we have been fortunate enough to have had a lot of the biggest players using our software for years and we have a great footprint. There are a lot of great competitors popping up. We stopped tracking them when the number hit 40.

Sramana: When it comes to customer acquisition, I imagine that you have to do direct selling to get to the banks, right?

Tommy Petrogiannis: I would have said yes until a few years ago. We did a cultural shift last year and it was pretty tough to go through. A few years ago if you had called us and asked to see our API documentation to see if we could be worked into a loan origination system, we would have passed you over to sales. Sales would have qualified you and made you sign an NDA and it would have taken about two weeks to get what you originally asked for.

In June 2013, we decided to completely open up. Our strategy was to make everything easy to find, evaluate, and buy. We made all of our API documentation available without forcing you to talk to someone here. You can create a developer account in our sandbox without talking to anybody and start integrating your code. We took that strategy because as the market started getting bigger, we wanted to get to the next tier down such as credit unions. We had to make it easy for them to evaluate.

Sramana: How do your potential clients find out about you?

Tommy Petrogiannis: There are multiple ways. The traditional way is through search engine optimization. We also use a lot of places where people go to understand what other people are saying. There is a disruptive group called G2 Crowd which is taking on Forrester and Gartner. Traditionally, we would have gotten on Forrester’s roadmap and walked them through what we were doing. G2 Crowd is all about comprehensive reviews from customers, which are validated. They can answer anywhere from 7 to 45 questions. They either really like you or they really hate you. Those peer review sites will rank you as opposed to an analyst network and I find that to be very representative of what customers really feel.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis
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