Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. How much of this were you able to cobble together as you launched the product?

Christian Blume: We launched our first beta on November 11, 2005. We worked together with a company that had a variety of different software solutions ranging from utility down to antivirus products. We were good friends with the CEO of the company. We said to him, “Would you give us a try?” He said, “I do a lot of mailings on a weekly basis to different target audiences. I’ll give you an emailing opportunity.” That was when we generated the first €15,000 in revenue.

To us, it was the proof of concept that our solution was working. The CEO said, “This really worked out nicely.” So he continued to give us additional mailings. If I remember correctly, three months after we had launched our beta, he actually said, “I really like your solution. You’re doing an excellent job.” That was the kickoff of Cleverbridge.

We were capable of on-boarding a lot more clients. The system had reached the stability level where we felt comfortable in saying, “It’s prime time for our solution.” Then we started working on those clients that we had come to know through different conferences. We went to FAC in the US, the European Software Conference in Berlin, and many others. We obviously had the relationships that we had established over the past couple of years. That’s when we started marketing the solution. Then word of mouth publicity quickly spread around. People were just saying, “Have you ever heard about Cleverbridge? You should try them.”

The thing that we also did and this is something that I think is one of the key success factors for us, is we never had any long-term tie-ins into contracts. What you have to understand in this scenario is we always said, “If our clients are successful, then we are doing a good job. If we are not doing a good job, then any client of ours should have the right to leave us at the instant they want to.” That always kept us on our back heels because we didn’t want to lose any of our clients. We wanted to make sure that they stayed with us. We had to make sure that our system is top notch all of the time. This is probably the most important lesson that I’ve learned. That is I’ve given out a solution that people enjoy working with. How can I prove that? Over the past 10 years that we started this company, we got a retention rate which is somewhere around 99.59%. We’ve just lost a handful of clients that have decided to either not work with us anymore for whatever reasons. All of the major clients that we’ve won over, they’ve all stayed with us.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume
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