Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to Badgeville?

Kris Duggan: It’s still going on. It’s growing and moving forward. Once you have a founding CEO replacement, there’s a lot of turmoil brought in by the CEO that was brought in. Now, they’re on to their third CEO. Those kind of challenges can be very disruptive to a company’s growth.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of Betterworks?

Kris Duggan: The idea for Betterworks came out of my experience at Badgeville. I wanted to make sure that everybody had goals, everybody was aligned, we were working on the right things, and there was very open collaboration and transparency around what people’s expectations were. I couldn’t find anything like Betterworks. We ended up using PowerPoint and Shattr. That was how we did goal setting at the company.

I wished that we could have had an off-the-shelf offer, but I couldn’t find anything. The PowerPoint didn’t work very well. People forgot stuff. It wasn’t effective. At the same time, I remember we were doing a FitBit challenge. I kept seeing people working around the block trying to get their steps in. I was like, “How come this doesn’t exist at work. Why don’t we have that?” The pain of doing goal setting at my company plus the observation of the FitBit style metaphor became the basis for Betterworks.

Sramana Mitra: I have a question here. This whole goal setting and aligning of the company, all this was SuccessFactors kind of pitch? Did you not find SuccessFactors to be a possible solution for what you were looking for?

Kris Duggan: We didn’t want a very heavy HRIF system. We wanted something that was very lightweight and easy and something that would be very easy to adopt. At that time, I just knew that I had the problem. I didn’t know that other people had the problem. When I started thinking of Betterworks, I was in the Q4 of 2013. I talked to 85 companies. Some have spreadsheets. Some have Workday. Some have Google docs. Some have PowerPoint.

It turns out that everybody does goal setting and nobody has an easy and engaging way to do it throughout the year. That was the immense validation that other people were going through the same challenge that I was. Fast forward to today, we have many customers that used to have SuccessFactors and now use Betterworks, or have Workday and use Betterworks. We’re even working with many traditional companies like pharmacies and supermarkets.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan
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