Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you price this?

Eyal Magen: It’s a SaaS-based model, so you have to pay every year. We usually sign multi-year deals. We price it based on a combination of elements of the product that you purchase and obviously, the number of users that you anticipate.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a volume-based pricing model?

Eyal Magen: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: To summarize what you do in terms of the value proposition, if a user is shopping online on the GAP site and wants to log into the GAP site with Facebook or Twitter, they’re essentially going through your system to get authenticated and logged in.

Eyal Magen: That’s phase one. Then we save the data securely and privately. The third important part is integration with third-party systems. For example, their emailing system, content recommendation system, and the CRM. We have tens, if not hundreds, of built-in integrations with third-party services. They can already use that data to further their business goals.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. In 2006 when you made the switch, you had a little bit of funding and you came back to your investors and you said, “This is not what we’re going to do. We’re going to do this.” The investors bought into it and you got your full $3 million funding to go ahead and execute on this strategy, right?

Eyal Magen: Yes, we had a very early version of the product ready and we had enough traction early on to convince them that we were on to something.

Sramana Mitra: Who were your first customers?

Eyal Magen: We had some brand customers. I honestly don’t remember. Brands were very early adopters. They always create new mini-sites where they want to play with new technologies. I’m talking about clients like Nike that we have right now. I don’t know if you know the Nike Run application on mobile to track your running?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Eyal Magen: When you login, the whole registration process is via Gigya.

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? Do you sell directly to these brands or do you go through system integrators?

Eyal Magen: We worked our way up, meaning we started with deals for types of clients that I call corporate. Then we worked ourselves up to enterprise. We originally did most of our sales internally. We actually developed our own methodology for sourcing and selling to these clients that we scaled. As we grew, we looked for bigger clients. We focused on different channels like system integrators and advertising agencies. We do all of that today.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen
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