Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This $20 million that you brought in, did you deploy it into operations or did the founders take liquidity from that investment?

Jason VandeBoom: It’s mostly just there for making the right decisions. We haven’t really deployed it. It was never our intent to push that to sales and marketing, which is the classic idea.

Sramana Mitra: But it wasn’t also deployed as buying some of the founder shares?

Jason VandeBoom: No. We were cash flow positive prior to this but we were never having $20 million or so in the bank. There’s something about having that cushion.

Sramana Mitra: When you look back on the trajectory, there are certain companies that you have been taking marketshare away from. Can you double-click down on what has been the go-to-market strategy? How do you identify InfusionSoft customers and how do you move them off InfusionSoft?

Jason VandeBoom: There’re a couple of strategies for that. First it starts with our product. It’s really that user experience creates natural, organic advocates of our platform. With InfusionPoint in particular, that was huge because there are companies that focus on sales primarily over product.

Sramana Mitra: I get that. How do InfusionSoft customers even get interested in your products at all?

Jason VandeBoom: Early on, we were working with consulting agencies a lot, so that’s a great way to get into a company’s network. By working with the same companies that partner with InfusionSoft but now also partner with us, when they’re going to deploy marketing automation for an SMB, what are they going to pick? Are they going to pick a platform that’s going to provide a bunch of questions and problems down the road?

Then you have what I was saying earlier which is more of that organic direct users talking to other users about the experience. To get in there, partners and also integration is an interesting one as well. It’s hard to do early on but if you can do a couple of solid integrations that gets you within the client base, people will start talking and then you can expand from there.

Sramana Mitra: What about Marketo? How do you get into Marketo accounts?

Jason VandeBoom: They’re an interesting segment that we really don’t target because we see them as enterprise focused. By the very fact that we’re not targeting it, we’re not taking that partnership approach necessarily. What we’re finding is, now that we have so many customers making it up in the enterprise and people are talking. They find that they can do more with the data and they can do it easier and faster. But that’s not something we’re overly focused on because we want to remain true to being focused on SMB.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom
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