Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you were executing this project, what was the business model for the company?

Lori Steele Contorer: The business model at that time was to sell election software and services, probably on a per election fee as opposed to a SaaS model. We would get hired to do an election and we would deliver the software and the services around that. It was usually done either remotely by PC or at a polling station.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size were these projects? The government of Australia was your client. What scale of a client was that?

Lori Steele Contorer: It was definitely mid-six figures. They were pilot projects for very specific voters. It wasn’t a large election for all voters and it wasn’t small private sector elections. It became clear to us though after that, that a SaaS model made a whole lot more of sense. Over the next few years, since we were innovating in the space we were probably going to get to run pilots for specific voter population. We wanted to use these pilots that are one-off to demonstrate that there’s a better way to deliver elections throughout the world. Going forward a few years, the mobile revolution really changed the perception of the customers and the ability to deliver on a SaaS model and to deliver at scale for all voters all the time.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit the $1 million mark?

Lori Steele Contorer: That just took a couple of years from the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: You made a business model pivot to SaaS in 2008?

Lori Steele Contorer: We started talking about it in 2008 and we started to get real traction with governments in 2010. Prior to that, although it was the right way to go, the governments were still in pilot mode and so we would get one-off pilots instead of the long-term contracts. Even though we changed the model in our mind and in our plan, getting the customers on-board and getting their model changed started to get a little traction in 2010 and it’s really accelerating now.

Sramana Mitra: Between 2007 and 2010, what other governments started embracing your technology?

Lori Steele Contorer: Australia and the UK were the primary adopters at that time. Then we realized that we felt we could make good progress in the United States. We came to the United States and we were really getting a lot of resistance to what we were then calling online voting. What we realized is that we had to think about the severely disenfranchised voters and how we could serve those voters. That would solve a real problem for the customers. The customers weren’t eager to innovate for the sake of innovating but they were eager to innovate to help serve their population that wasn’t being served.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer
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