Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me get a bit more granular in some of these steps. When you started getting the sense that there was this product opportunity while you were essentially acting as a reseller and system integrator on top of what became the Adobe technology, what was your business situation? You were a self-financed company. What kind of revenue levels were you pulling at that point? What year are we talking about?

Phil Copeland: We started Avoka in late 2002. By about 2011, we were probably up to $10 or $11 million in revenue through a lot of consulting services work. We used to sell some of the Adobe products as well as our own products. We’d grown that business from scratch to around $10 million in revenue. We were starting to get a small amount of money from selling our own product as well but it was relatively small in those early years.

Over the last couple of years, we transitioned from becoming the Adobe specialist system integrator to a standalone company. It’s been a tricky transition because we’ve had an older business that had quite a lot of revenue that really provided the cash flow to fund the product development team and grow the other side of business. So we’ve had one business that’s been on the decline; but at the same time, we’ve been rapidly expanding sales in the Avoka Transact business.

Today, our revenues are around $14 million. Of that $14 million, three quarters of that comes from our new Avoka Transact business. We have a little bit of money from our old Adobe business. This year, we expect to see around about 80% growth in our Avoka Transact business. We’re getting close to $17 million in revenue just out of the Transact business alone. We’re still completely self-funded.

We had one investor that we brought on board last year who was actually the founder of one of the venture capital companies in Australia. He’s a very well-known identity and father figure by the name of Roger Allen. He used to have a venture capital company Allen and Buckeridge. Roger came on board last year to specifically help us with funding around expanding our marketing demand generation budget because we wanted to have enough money to promote what we’re doing and have a pretty decent marketing budget basically.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you were essentially making that transition from the services business to more of building your own product. What year did you get the product ready?

Phil Copeland: We were selling early versions of the product all the way from 2006, but it was only part of the product. The big change occurred in late 2011 when we replaced the Adobe forms technology with our own HTML-based forms technology that let whatever we built work smoothly. The term we use is, multi-channel environment. It means that somebody could design and build an interaction with a customer that works smoothly across mobile devices – smart phones, tablets, or desktops. We launched that as a standalone product in the beginning of 2012. An interesting element of this story is all about being in the right place at the right time. Frankly, you can’t really second guess it. You just have to be in the right spot at the right time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland
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