A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were on the team at this point when you were going through this?

Jonny Nicol: Six months earlier, there were 16 people. I actually let people go before we ran out of money, which was painful. Then there were eight of us. It wasn’t actually the case that they could work completely for free, because I still had to pay some bills. Everybody came to me with a number they absolutely had to have to pay rent. Most people were using their savings.

It turned out that we needed at least $60,000 to keep the company going. I went to my bank who’ve obviously seen me through this journey as an army officer rather than an entrepreneur. They said, “We’ll give you this loan unsecured.” That was a personal loan to me. I went out and we got through. I got a phone call for Citizen watches who were launching a new watch that could automatically update in time zones. They needed a pilot to fly it around the world in 24 hours. They couldn’t find a pilot willing to do it. I did that job. It paid $55,000.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! Good seed money.

Jonny Nicol: That was enough to keep us going. I had to fly around the Arctic Circle 80ºN. If you go to YouTube, you can see a documentary about it. It’s called Chasing Horizons. I took all the money from that and put it back into the company. Late one night in November 2014, Alex, my CTO, and I were working. We tried this experiment with multi-threading the CPU.

We just tried to update the database engine instead of the code that sits on top of that. Literally, in a single test, it went down to 18 seconds. Alex and I were looking at each other. I laughed because I assumed that we screwed it up. We did it again. Still, 18 seconds. I had given my soul to this company. Alex and I burst into tears. The relief was just unbelievable. We had taken an idea and built something which was going to change the world. From that money, our fortunes completely changed. We went from a company that was worth nothing to where the valuation went to $16 million in a week.

Sramana Mitra: Were you able to raise money? Where did that money come from? Did you actually raise money on that valuation?

Jonny Nicol: Yes. We raised $18 million in the beginning of 2015. This was less than two years. In 20 months, we went from a company that had no customers and no revenues to being live in 45 different countries. Our revenues went from zero to $10 million in four months.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you acquired customers. Talk about the business building.

Jonny Nicol: We’re a two-sided business. The first side is we had to have the aircraft in the system. We built this technology that everybody said couldn’t be built. Nobody believed that it works. It was a given that you couldn’t work out all those different calculations in such a short amount of time. Operators who flatly refused to give me a meeting 18 months ago are asking me come in because they, desperately, want to be on the system.

Sometimes when you’re running a business, you have to understand the conventional wisdom doesn’t work in every scenario. I hired a software B2B sales team to go out there and give the operators one of our products. It’s an inventory management system for aircraft owners. It’s phenomenally complicated, but they desperately need it. The conversion rate was 4%. They only got the earliest adopters. I tried a different tactic, which everyone thought I was mad to do. I just had a gut feeling on it.

I went out and bought myself a plane – a 1983 cargo plane. I flew to meet as many operators that would give a meeting. I found the conversion rate to be 98% because when you turn up as the CEO and you flew yourself in in an aircraft, which is well-known for being very hard to fly and say, “I’m here to talk to you about the private jet industry. By the way, I flew this thing here”, you actually earn their respect. That is what gets you a meeting with them. When you get a meeting with them, you can prove to them that the system works. That was how we did the supply side.

Looking back, it was just unbelievable. It was all over Europe. In January 2016, I flew that same plane across the Arctic to America. Here’s an interesting statistic for you. I did 486 meetings in 197 cities in 94 business days in the US. You can only do that with private aviation. The team I took put up with me. Each weekend, we just stopped at whichever bit of America we happened to be in. I saw every inch of America. The average flight time was only about 50 minutes. You never got very high. I literally saw all of America go past me. It was incredible with incredible teamwork. The team stood by me.

This segment is part 6 in the series : A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet
1 2 3 4 5 6 7