Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you found your product-market fit, there were other players in the market in the visualization space like Tableau. What did you experience from a competitive challenge point of view?

Allan Wille: We actually saw relatively little competition. That’s because we were going after small and midsize companies. Even today, the business intelligence and visualization space is very crowded, but it’s crowded in the enterprise. All those players exist to sell into larger organizations. They have an outbound sales force. They’re very expensive and complex.

We focus on the small and midsize companies where they don’t have an analyst or they don’t have an IT person. How can we be prescriptive and valuable to that market when there really aren’t any competitors? Our closest competitors are the folks that are using Excel. That was a real eyeopener that this space is still very much a green field opportunity.

Ten years ago if you wanted to buy QuickBooks, you would go to a brick-and-mortar store. Today, QuickBooks online has more than 1.5 million customers. The SMB market has changed dramatically.

Sramana Mitra: The cloud delivery model has been a very big driver in that. It has completely changed the game for selling SMB software.

Allan Wille: True. The delivery model, the fact that prices have come down, the ease of use – all of these things have made SMB a huge market.

Sramana Mitra: The thing that I find very encouraging in your story is you really managed to crank up the SEO such that you were getting a really good inbound lead generation. That’s one of the challenges of catering to this market. How do you go after them? Whom do you after? How do you profitably conclude sales? In your case, the SEO part was that driver.

Allan Wille: If you search for marketing dashboards or sales dashboards, I think we’re in the top one, two, or three search results. I think we are on 500 of those terms right now. Marketing is amazing about how they’re understanding it. It has to be efficient. Just a quick note back to the competition, the biggest challenge that we faced with the crowded landscape was when we talked to investors. That was our biggest challenge – convincing and finding an investor that understood that SMB and enterprise were very different.

Sramana Mitra: Were you successful in raising funding?

Allan Wille: Yes. After being a startup for 12 years, we did. This was neat because we started to see this traction. After our second year, we had 1,100 customers. This is when I went out to a good friend who successfully exited two other businesses. We said, “Here’s what’s happening. Our business is starting to take off. What do you think? Do you think we should continue to grow, or do you think we should accelerate this?”

He immediately said, “You have something here. You have something that is worth growing.” We did a seed round in 2014. One of the things worth mentioning there was that one of the investors was Rob Ash. Rob Ash is the past CEO of Cognos.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to him?

Allan Wille: Rob is from Ottawa. Cognos is in Ottawa. In many cases, Ottawa is considered as a business intelligence capital. He’s active in the angel community. He was looped in. He loved it. He loved the fact that we were not going after the enterprise. He put money in. That was a huge endorsement. As soon as Rob said that he was in, the seed round came together very easily. It was a very positive experience.

A year later, we did our Series A. We raised $6.2 million. That was a difficult round because that’s when we were working with these investors to talk about the market and where we fit. They were very hesitant about getting into a space that seemed to be so crowded. A lot of investors also didn’t like the fact that we were going after SMB. As a matter of fact, I heard one investor in New York, “We get that you’re going after SMB, but when are you going to grow up?” That was the end of that meeting.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a funny one.

Allan Wille: You really have to have good alignment with your investment team. We were looking for an investor that understood and was excited about the SMB market. I think I talked to 40 or 50 VCs to close our Series A.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio
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