Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 3)

Nick Hedges: The company was founded by Jeff Solomon who was running a software development company in Los Angeles. He had several clients who were in the mortgage industry, and they were asking him for a system that allowed them to be more efficient on how they manage the leads that they were purchasing from companies. He built three or four of these systems. He got together with an individual called Charles Chase who had just graduated from business school. He said, “There’s an opportunity here to build this as  a SaaS.”

In other words, you can configure it to your business needs but the core is fundamentally the same. They set out to do that. Before business school, Charles had worked at, what is now, Cornerstone OnDemand. He recruited another founder Tony Christopoulos who was the Chief Architect at Cornerstone OnDemand. He became the founding CTO of Leads360.

The three of them created this company. For the first six months, Tony did random contract work during the day that helped with the cash flow. In the night, he would code the application. They ended up with a solution that was MVP. They got a contract to build what their first customer needed. I think they convinced the customer to pay them $10,000 to be on this platform that Tony had built. That got the company off the ground. After they had their first customer, they quichly got to their first million within a year.

Sramana Mitra: Was there a specific segment that was particularly resonating with the value proposition?

Nick Hedges: The positioning of the company was that they made the leads that people were buying more valuable because the alternative for these mortgage companies was to receive leads from these lead providers via email, fax or in an Excel spreadsheet. It was a very low level of sophistication. If someone goes on to a website like LendingTree, they fill out all of their information because they want competitive quotes. Then LendingTree sends a fax to that mortgage company. Then sales manager hands that out to the person they want them to call. It just takes way too long. What their system did was it brought speed and organisation to the process of leads response.

Sramana Mitra: The traction was in the mortgage lending leads industry.

Nick Hedges: Yes, it was 100% mortgage industry at that time.

Sramana Mitra: All this groundwork was already done by the time you showed up on the scene?

Nick Hedges: Right.

Sramana Mitra: You joined the company in 2008?

Nick Hedges: Yes, January 2008.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify
1 2 3 4 5 6 7