An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: From whom did you raise $500,000?

Cameron Weeks: We got lucky. We say that this company is very blessed. One of the partners that came in was actually a VC firm from California called Small World Group.

Sramana Mitra: Is this Frank Levinson?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, you know Frank?

Sramana Mitra: Very well, actually. How did Frank find out about you?

Cameron Weeks: Frank actually came to us. He sent his Indiana assistant to find companies of interest to invest into. The business incubator we were living in identified us and another company. Frank is one of the first investors to come into the company. Frank is a great guy.

Sramana Mitra: Frank is a great guy, absolutely. Frank is from Indiana. I can see why he went into Indiana. You raised half a million dollars from Frank. That was against a couple of million dollars’ letter of intent or PO effectively?

Cameron Weeks: Yes. We’ve never disclosed funding that we’ve taken on. I have to be careful with that. We don’t publicly disclose revenue other than in general terms. We don’t disclose funding either, but I’ll try to be as helpful as I can in this article. Frank came in to invest in the company. A funny story goes. The RCA ended up blowing up. We’ve taken on money from a couple of people, one of which was Frank. The RCA project didn’t go anywhere. They can’t take the product into the US. We were luckily smart enough to see that this was coming and these issues were laying out there and it wasn’t going to come through the way we wanted it to or in the time that we wanted it to. We quickly made some changes internally and refocused our sales team from working on distribution partners with RCA to going out and selling our services directly and competing with the guys you mentioned before.

Sramana Mitra: You got this product out in what time frame after you got the money from Frank?

Cameron Weeks: We actually already had the product fully running and operating. When we took the money from Frank, it was really to build a sales team and maybe a little bit of marketing to alleviate some of the work that we were doing on a daily basis. We had customers and we had a product already.

Sramana Mitra: What customer acquisition strategy worked for you in that early phase?

Cameron Weeks: It was very local market. We engaged with the events going on around us and being part of the community.

Sramana Mitra: You were selling to small businesses in your local community?

Cameron Weeks: One of the interesting things with the product was the way we engineered it. Having the experience of working on the web side of things where we would have sites getting millions and millions of hits a day, we worked out our network to build the same way. What I mean by that is we didn’t care if it was a one-person law office that was using our product or a university with hundreds and thousands of extensions. Within the first year and a half of raising money and rebranding the company, we actually had one-person law firms, universities, and a hospital using our product. We ran this wide gamut of client base.

This segment is part 4 in the series : An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks
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