Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your company seemed to have somehow found its stride, but you left. When you left that company, what did you do next?

Allan Wille: It’s a long story. I’ll put out some of the highlights. We started Klipfolio in the fall of 2001. At that time, since all I knew was the funding scenario, the idea was we’re going to go out and raise money. That’s what we did with the first company. Of course, there was no angel and VC in their right mind who was going to invest in a pre-revenue startup. That was a very good lesson for me.

It was a very good point in history because it really made me reset the way I approached creating value. We had a spark of an idea. We were thrilled. There were three founders including myself. The entire idea was, “There must be a better way to present real-time information to users.” We actually built the technology and got it out into end user’s hands. It was wildly popular. We were actually going after the consumer market at that time. We weren’t able to raise any funding but somehow we had this spark that was really being eaten up in the market. We had lots and lots of people downloading and telling us how wonderful it was.

Sramana Mitra: How were people finding you?

Allan Wille: It’s a very good question. There were a lot of things that we did right in the early days that are much harder today. We took a very close look at search engine optimization (SEO). I think there were things you could exploit and I think there were a lot fewer companies that were really starting to understand SEO.

We had this advantage that we were one of the few tech companies that understood the early value of optimizing for Google and Yahoo!. We got a lot of visibility because of that, but there was still a problem. The problem was that we weren’t finding any business buyers. The entire idea was that through this desktop channel of real-time news, weather, and sports scores, we would find a buyer in publishers or news media outlets.

They didn’t have any money and they didn’t have any interest. I remember that I was in this really conflicted state. On one hand, we had this massive success. Within a year and a half, we had 300,000 users. It was absolute madness and beyond my wildest dreams. But we had no money.

Sramana Mitra: People were downloading free software and using it, but they were not paying for it.

Allan Wille: The end users were not paying anything. The thought was that with a large enough user base, we would be able to go to the publishers and charge them to use this channel, but the publishers don’t have any money. I remember being on the phone with our ISP saying that we couldn’t pay our bills and yet we had this phenomenal success with the desktop product.

It’s an interesting lesson because, in many cases, if you work with your vendors and you believe in the relationship between you, as a company, and your vendors that you need to grow, I think they will support you in hard times as well. We had a lot of our early vendors who said, “No problems. We’ll give you a six-month vacation on your bills.” That has stuck with me. I think there’s a lot of goodwill and future goodwill to be gained in these little acts of patience and kindness.

As it happened, we did have lots and lots of users. There was a very lucky incident where a large airline started to use our tool from an end user point of view. They called us and said, “We have a number of our employees using your free tool. Is it possible to have this tool surface business metrics as opposed to news, weather, or stocks.” We said yes. We were desperate for any kind of lucky break to help us find a match for this. Here we had a customer that had a real problem.

They had a problem where they were not getting their business metrics out to their employees in real-time. That was a real shift in the company. All of sudden, we had a dashboard that was no longer doing consumer information but was doing business information. Had it not been for that call and our willingness to say yes, we would have been in a very different position. I always remember that as one of those difficult lessons.

Sramana Mitra: I guess the airline had users who found you on their own and they realized that those users wanted to use your product, and then they called you.

Allan Wille: 100%.

Sramana Mitra: That was a real stroke of luck.

Allan Wille: It was. The important lesson in it is that, as an entrepreneur, you have to have both parts: belief in your vision and also keeping your eyes and ears open.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio
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