Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think the process that you’ve outlined is a very effective process. I’ve seen case study after case study where people have been successful in doing this. That’s to take some existing product that’s in the market, start selling and do some sort of a value-added reseller or system integration kind of partnership. That enables entrepreneurs to get close to customers, learn their problems, and then productize and build IP based on that knowledge. You’ve very clearly articulated a process that absolutely works. It’s a tried and true proven process.

Phil Copeland: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve run through this talk a few times. There’s a time and place too for getting venture-backed businesses, but I have to say that some of the worst disasters I’ve seen in businesses starting up are companies that have had too much money to start with. There was a classic company in Australia in the early 2000s that was backed by two really first-class organizations and they put $50 or $60 million into this business. These guys just had so much money to play with that they ended up creating a product that was never sell-able. It was very big, became very complicated, and they tried to tackle many different things, rather than being focused on one core area of technology they’re very good at. They could have been very successful. In fact, their product back then was a memory resident database, which of course is exactly what Oracle and everybody is working on today. If they had just stayed focused on that, they could have done extremely well. They built their own programming language and all other things. It failed miserably.

Coming back to Avoka, back in 2005, we were a minnow, but we had very close relationships with a lot of the key engineers and architects that were now inside Adobe building. We were actually engaged by Adobe to do some of the engineering work to get that product into the market place. At the same time, we were hungrily looking for business opportunities. We won a project for ACT or Canberra government in Australia to help them replace all their revenue collection forms that were on their website. They had a very clever business manager who had worked there for many years and who managed to articulate all their problems clearly.

The issues they were facing was that they were collecting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue each year through their old existing website, which was built by their payment gateway provider. Every year, they would be introducing new products and making changes to their fees and services for all their existing problems. All these changes ended up costing them a small fortune. It was very slow and difficult to get rolled out and integrated back into their website. She summarized it all beautifully. She said, “Why can’t I go out and buy a really sophisticated online forms platform management system that can be integrated with my citizen self-service portal and handle and manage all my payments. Also, I want to provide integration to each of my 14 or 15 different agencies that are part of my state government. This should work as a shared service and should also provide service for our help desk.”

Needless to say, we actually won that, built, and implemented that solution for them using some of Adobe’s products. We ended up building out a very extensive server product ourselves that provided all that integration and handled the business part of their website. The business part was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, so it was really important. While we were building this, we started saying to ourselves, “This is fantastic. Everybody needs something like this whether you’re a bank or a government.” There’s nothing like it in the marketplace today. It immediately solved a lot of problems for both the ACT government and, even more importantly, their citizens and the people who are using it. The convenience of being able to apply for a lot of their licenses and services online was just a really successful project and solution.

Straight after that, we went back and said, “Let’s go ahead and use the lessons we learned out of that and really rebuild a product from scratch that can be our own IP.” We still use some of Adobe’s forms technology. It was definitely the best forms technology out there back then. We saw that there was a real opportunity there. That was in 2006 to 2007 time frame. Immediately within three or four months of starting to build that product, we had four or five customers signed up and wanting to use it because we were addressing a real hole in the marketplace that enabled us to solve those kinds of business problems for them.

To cut a long story short, in 2010, Apple launched their iPad product. That turned the world upside down for a lot of these large organizations that were used to doing business with their customers by an interactive PDF document. Interactive PDF was no longer supported by the Apple devices. By 2011, all of our customers were saying to us, “We need exactly what you’re doing but it needs to work across a wide variety of devices.” We set about creating our own forms technology that instead of being based on interactive PDF, was built around the latest and greatest HTML technologies. We took a lot of the lessons and the knowledge we had acquired through rolling out these kinds of systems to many customers worldwide. We took that knowledge and built our own forms technology. In late 2011, we launched the first version of Avoka Transact product as a standalone product that was completely independent of the Adobe interactive forms technologies. It could work independently. We were able to migrate a lot of our existing customers across to that.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland
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