Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How far did that take you? What were you able to do with that model?

Josh Manion: I described that as it was enough to survive but that was about it. That got us to maybe $100,000 in revenue. It wasn’t much.

Sramana Mitra: It was you and your wife at that point?

Josh Manion: Yes. If you think about the growth of that, we struggled along in that state for couple of years where I would describe it as if you’re an entrepreneur and you started a services business, you go on this yo-yo of feast or famine. You’re either selling or delivering. If you’re delivering, you’ve got money but not time to sell. If you’re selling, you’ve got plenty of time to sell but generally no money. You’re oscillating between those two things.

It was not before 2004 when we bit the bullet and said, “We’re being too reactive about it.” As part of that, we committed a lot of the sins that services company typically do. We chased pretty much anything that a customer would pay us to do. We quickly learned that every time we took on a project that wasn’t web analytics related, it was a bad idea. In 2004, we had this epiphany that we needed to go all in on the business and grow our suite. We actually hired a couple of people who were right out of college to be analysts for us and deliver the work so that I could focus on more of the selling.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you hire these people from?

Josh Manion: We hired them from the University of Illinois.

Sramana Mitra: The business was still a consulting business though?

Josh Manion: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: How much longer did you carry on with this consulting business model?

Josh Manion: I’ll give you the nutshell version. The consulting company went on until my wife and I sold out our interest. In 2009, I stopped working on the consulting company, which is my current company.

Sramana Mitra: How big did the consulting company become?

Josh Manion: The consulting got up to about maybe $6 million to $7 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people?

Josh Manion: About 30.

Sramana Mitra: All this was based in the Chicago area?

Josh Manion: We had a handful of consultants who were remote in places like New York and Minneapolis. There was only one office—in the Chicago suburbs.

Sramana Mitra: Did you develop any kind of specialization as part of this experience of building the consulting business?

Josh Manion: It certainly was formative in the decision to start Ensighten and the awareness of the problem of the space. Essentially, we found that our sweet spot was working with large, highly complicated enterprises and helping them with anything from their strategy to the technical implementation.

When my wife and I had founded Ensighten, we were doing that while we had a front row view on the pain of the enterprises around having extracting value from the digital marketing platforms of the day. In 2009 and to this day, the big incumbents are Adobe, IBM, and Oracle. The experience at Stratigent was phenomenal in understanding what was missing that presented the opportunity to disrupt the entire digital marketing ecosystem.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion
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