Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All these years, it’s a progression and evolution of the same company that you’re still running today?

Colin Earl: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: This previous product that you’re comparing your current contract management software with, what year was that?

Colin Earl: The first product was roughly in 1996 to 2002. We ran with that product. We used the revenue from it to fund development of, what is today, Agiloft.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue did that first product make?

Colin Earl: It made, cumulatively, a few million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were working on it?

Colin Earl: Half a dozen.

Sramana Mitra: That went on for six years?

Colin Earl: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Colin Earl: That brings us up to, roughly, 2004.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do differently in 2004? What happened and what changed?

Colin Earl: In 2004, we really began to focus on development of Agiloft.

Sramana Mitra: What was that? What was the mission?

Colin Earl: The mission for Agiloft was to build a platform upon which it was possible to build enterprise class products without coding.

Sramana Mitra: You started development on that after 2004 or were you doing that in parallel while you were selling the other product?

Colin Earl: We were thinking about it. We were designing it earlier than that. We actually pulled the trigger and began development back in 2004. It was only by 2008 that Agiloft was ready for production use.

Sramana Mitra: During those four years, you were developing this new product. It was being financed by revenues from the previous product.

Colin Earl: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You started selling it around 2008?

Colin Earl: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you first sell to?

Colin Earl: Delaware Investments.

Sramana Mitra: What was the use case? Why did they want to use this product? How did they find you?

Colin Earl: They were, previously, a Support Wizard customer. They were upgrading to the new release.

Sramana Mitra: How did the business ramp?

Colin Earl: Very slowly at first. It’s only really begun to ramp rapidly in the past three years. The reasons for that are two-fold. Firstly, it takes time to stabilize a new product. It takes much more time and thought to build an efficient sales organization and to really wrap your arms around and build the in-house expertise to go about large enterprise implementations.

The mistake a lot of people make as engineers and marketers is thinking that the business is the product. You need a great product to make a great business, but a great product isn’t anything like sufficient to make a great business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right.

Colin Earl: You need all the attributes that go around into turning it into something that is commercially viable. That includes sales, marketing, website collateral, case studies, performance reports, benchmarking, third-party security analysis, etc. Only when all of those pieces are in place do you have something that you can really take to market and begin to make significant revenue out of.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft
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