From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company?

Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining company. I spent about 18 months there and built that out. We got to the point where the mining company was really happy with it and started rolling it out.

In the history of computing, there have been about three really big changes in technology. There was a move from mainframes to mini computers, then from mini computers to PCs, and then PCs to the Internet was the next big wave. I felt like I had done my penance in the mining industry. I sold my part of the company and used that money to bootstrap Insightly.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of Insightly?

Anthony Smith: I actually didn’t really know what I wanted to do in the beginning. I worked with four small companies in Perth in Western Australia to move them to the cloud. One was a company that had three hairdressing salons. Another was a consulting company. Third was a company with landscapers. Fourth was a company that had some mobile plumbing services for consumers.

These were four disparate companies. We moved them all to the cloud. We got them set up with the new Google apps and Quickbooks online. All four of those companies didn’t have a customer relationship management program, but they all had a lot of customers.

I thought that they should really be using a CRM. We looked around for a CRM system that integrated really well with Google apps and Quickbooks. There wasn’t really any that fit the bill for small businesses. There were quite a few CRMs that were made for very large businesses that were expansive and complex and hard to use, but none that were really suited to the four businesses that I was working with.

Sramana Mitra: That sounds a little bit strange to me. You’re talking about late 2000s. At that point, Salesforce was pervasive. How can you say that there were no CRM systems that were appropriate and inexpensive for small businesses?

Anthony Smith: Salesforce was fairly expensive. Zoho was a similar product.

Sramana Mitra: They’re not expensive at all. Salesforce itself is quite inexpensive. How can you say they’re expensive products?

Anthony Smith: I guess it depends on your lens. When you’re looking at Quickbooks online, which cost $11.95 per month for your whole team to use and Google Apps which is $4.95 per month for each individual, and then you look at Salesforce which is $99 per user per month. That’s a significant amount of money.

The real difference between those tools and some of the SMB products is that both Salesforce and Zoho need a full-time CRM administrator in order to keep the system running and in order to set it up correctly. They are both designed for selling products into territories where sales people get tied upon a commission. That’s the way the software is built whereas these four businesses didn’t necessarily sell products.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly
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