Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that your main competitive strategy in winning accounts that would use your software for their sales enhancement process was to find them through different channels where you were not facing competitors?

Guy Mucklow: Largely. I guess, it was also about the way in which we sold. We had a major focus on delivering an incredibly good self-serve customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I would like to hear a little bit about is the product-side differentiation. You talked about finding touch points with customers where you had less competition. Was there product-side differentiation also?

Guy Mucklow: There have been two major product innovations in our business. If I can relate it back to the overall vision of the business, which is to transform our market through the power of search and service, to transform anything is to say that the market is not where it should be. We think there is a bigger and better opportunity. To do that requires a significant amount of confidence in our ability to recognize what the market requires that it isn’t getting at the moment.

There are two major transformations that we have done in our market over 16 years. The first major transformation was seeing the potential of the Internet to provide a much better and elegant way of connecting to data that is incredibly dynamic. We drove that innovation in our market. We got laughed at quite regularly. We carried on regardless. The other major innovation was if you consider the case of the UK address validation market. Most people in the UK know their postal codes. From the postal codes, you can get a list of 20 or 30 addresses, one of which is yours. In terms of delivering a really elegant user experience in the checkout process, it gives you that.

You can’t, unfortunately, do that in the States. Most people only know their zip codes. From a zip code, you get the city and state. There’s a long list of roughly 3,000 addresses that sits underneath the zip code. In terms of delivering a decent user experience, you’re not going to get an address lookup from a zip code. By changing the way in which the technology actually functions to create a much more intuitive search-based way of looking up addresses, we could bring together an international address validation solution which would enable people in the States to look up addresses and be able to find a full zip plus four coded addresses from one or two snippets of information. We have driven that style of lookup search in our market and lead in that sense.

The other thing that we did is in e-commerce, data is borderless unless you’ve precluded someone from interacting on your website. What we also did was to create a seamless, homogenous licensing model that had data from all around the world on one single payment term that will enable us to create this borderless experience. If someone did want to look up a German or Italian address, they could do that and do it very simply without having to think about different licensing models.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict
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