Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?

Isaac Oates: I got a lot of help initially. It was pretty easy and there was a lot of luck involved. When I was at Etsy, one of the members of their Board was an investor. I know Danny who’s on Etsy’s Board. I told him that I would start a new company. He was like, “Great. You should come talk to us at Index.” A couple of weeks later, we had money in the bank from there. I also raised some money from my co-founders at my last company.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise as your first round of funding? You’re raising money on a concept?

Isaac Oates: Yes, a concept and a very hideous five-slide deck. We raised about a million dollars total in a period of a year. That early part was pretty easy. Finding the team was harder. I left Etsy and I really wanted to respect my former employers, and so I didn’t try and recruit from them. I put a description and put in on LinkedIn. I went to these coding bootcamps. I hired two engineers out of General Assembly here in New York to help me build the platform.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get to an MVP?

Isaac Oates: We managed to build a product that did something in about 90 days. The big thing for us was being able to process payments. We started in January of 2013. In April of 2013, we were able to start processing some payments. Our revenue in April 2013 was around $3. We had an extremely low price point. I decided that I just wanted to get there as fast as humanly possible. We got there in 90 days.

Sramana Mitra: Your idea of having a somewhat integrated solution meant that you had to have payroll processing and some amount of HR. Is that a correct observation or did you do something different?

Isaac Oates: I would emphasize the M in MVP. It is true that the real value proposition for our customers today are dozens of different things that they can get through a platform really easily. It makes it really hard to build an MVP. We built this product that just did one thing. We found a couple of pilot customers for whom that was enough.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find those customers?

Isaac Oates: The first one was the coworking space that we were sitting in at that time. The other thing that we started doing pretty early turned out to be pretty incredible. We would set up these dinners. We would just invite everybody we knew to dinner. Everybody would just hang out. It wasn’t even a sales pitch. It was just getting everybody together. We started to build this community of people that knew what we were about. Somehow, we were on the same page.

We started a following here in New York mainly based on those dinners. We’d have some existing customers and prospects. What really happened is that people would come to dinner and they’d have an amazing time talking to some great people. When you look at our early customers, they really took a chance on us. We were able to keep building the product. Where we are today is not a goodwill issue. It’s incredibly valuable. That first part was extraordinarily difficult because we were building an MVP for something that has got a broad feature set.

Sramana Mitra: All this is happening in 2013?

Isaac Oates: Yes, 2013 and 2014. We hired a sales team in the Spring of 2014, about three years ago. That was when started to take off. That was when we started picking up the phone. We had a small but happy customer base. It took two years end-to-end from hiring our first engineer to a point where we had traction.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates
1 2 3 4 5