Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about the New Zealand team?

Jason Westland: I still have them. They’re our development team. If you can imagine going back to 2014, it was just me and the development team. Now, I have a team of customer support and marketing people here in Austin. The development team in New Zealand has scaled.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of metrics? How many customers? Where you run rate wise?

Jason Westland: I believe we have 16,052 paying customers.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average number of users per customer?

Jason Westland: That’s the total volume of paying users.

Sramana Mitra: The price point is still $25 a month?

Jason Westland: It is still $25 but the price point reduces based on the size of the account.

Sramana Mitra: What is the annual revenue that you did in 2015?

Jason Westland: We’re between $5 million and $8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you want to go from here?

Jason Westland: We are currently rebuilding the platform to make it more of a mass market product. If you can imagine, we originally signed up those professional project managers, and we are still signing them up today. The market has changed a lot since 2008. These days, anyone can be involved in managing projects. We’re looking to adapt our product so that it suits anyone in business whether it’s an administrator or a receptionist.

A classic example of such a segment is manufacturing. It might be a Process Analyst. What we want to do is widen our product dramatically and also simplify it a lot. The reason why that’s so important for us is because it needs to match our brand. The brand is a very generic brand. People who come to us expect that it can do anything. If someone was to go to Clarizen that had to learn what the product was about, a vertical brand would suit them better. Even though we have a vertical product, we have a horizontal brand. To make the most out of that conversion rate, we’re best to have multiple additions for our product which allows us to increase the total market cap.

Sramana Mitra: You continue to run the company profitably?

Jason Westland: Not at the moment. We are spending the $4 million round that we raised in 2014. It took me until about nine months ago to realize that we had to be growing faster than we could. We’ve been so highly profitable. We actually found it difficult to spend the money that we raised. We’re doing things now that we didn’t think we would be able to afford to do by using the capital. The good thing is we have a very long run rate. That’s a good place to be in this market.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I’m thrilled that your story arrived for me to cover because I like stories like this where entrepreneurs from all over the world are able to really be creative and original, and build strong businesses. I wish you all the best.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com
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