Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up with this? You were working with enterprise customers and requested this functionality? What was the process of coming up with this particular product?

Robert Castles: That’s a great question. We have been doing much of what our product is today in a more ad hoc manner. We were fortunate enough to have a technology partner who knew about what we did. They had a customer that had built an internal system that did a lot of what we do today. We did a call and they showed us what they had. It was beautiful. It was one of the best applications that I’d ever seen. They said, “We like the way it looks, but we hate this application.” I asked them why. They said, “We can’t do anything else other than exactly what it does. If we need a field on this form, we have to ask someone to do it.”

The light bulb went off. That has been what we’ve been good at for years. They basically showed us what we wanted to build. They actually didn’t end up becoming a client, but we went ahead and built what they had shown us. We signed up our first three customers shortly after.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. What were the profiles of these first three customers and how did you get to them?

Robert Castles: One of the things that we learned early on was that we were good at making products but not as good about what telling the world what we were doing. We would pick up great accounts, but we would let it stop there. When we had this idea on our hands, we really invested hard. We built up a sales capacity. We invested in marketing messages. We got the message out. We met our clients that way.

Joe LeCompte: We started going to trade shows.

Robert Castles: We, very quickly, signed up our first opportunities. They were very large businesses.

Joe LeCompte: These have 5,000 employees with typically $3 billion to $5 billion in revenue who were struggling with some problem—problems like getting employees on-boarded, providing a good interface to interact with IT, or trying to manage a series of very short marketing campaigns. They had a problem that involved coordinating work across multiple departments and could not figure out a good way to bridge that gap.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find out about these problems though? The fact that these particular companies or these particular people within these very large companies have these problems, how did that cross your path?

Joe LeCompte: We started with doing outbound marketing and going to trade shows. One of the first trade shows that we went to, I believe, was ITSMS where different people would come in and say, “We’re looking for a front-end to IT.” This happens all the time. We’ll show one part of the company what we have and because of the way Robert had architected it, it’s flexible enough to go to other departments. Somebody might be looking for front-end interface to IT but has a friend in marketing who they’re tired of hearing about how hard it is to spin up a marketing campaign. They’re interested in what we have and they also make the second introduction.

Given the business rhythm of who has the budget at a given time, the IT person might not have money but the marketing person would. We would engage with marketing but with both groups knowing that the same deployment can easily accommodate IT.

Robert Castles: We did find there was this interesting emerging trend in this IT service catalogue space. There’s this group out of UK – the Office of Government Commerce – who had defined ITIL very close to the timeframe that we got out with this product. We saw that we were offering a product that solved a part of the ITIL problem set better than it was being described. We basically started campaigning Google and doing trade shows. We got the word out and that worked very well for us.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles
1 2 3 4 5 6 7