Bootstrapping with Sophisticated Strategy: Rob Douglas, CEO of BioConnect (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When did you crack your first multi-million enterprise deal in this mode?

Rob Douglas: A couple of years ago. Now it’s a regular course for our company.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. This strategy really worked out.

Rob Douglas: Yes, it has. It needs a lot of patience to get there. You really have to be willing to see the thing through over a multi-year period of time. The interesting thing is, it took us eight years to complete 30 integrations and form 30 partnership ecosystem. It’ll take us another three years to do 10 times that. Within three years, we’ll go from 30 to 300. The speed of the acceleration of the ecosystem and our ability to execute is now underway.

Sramana Mitra: Give me another metric. What was the revenue growth trajectory? You launched the product in 2012 and we just finished 2017. You’ve been in the market for five years. There are clear acceleration points when the million-dollar deals start to kick in. If you can benchmark the revenue trajectory for me in whatever way is comfortable for you, that would be great.

Rob Douglas: Between 2012 and 2015, revenue growth was not very much. I’ll do it in percentage terms. We were in the 10% to 15%. In the early phases, the growth was really underwhelming. In 2015 through to the end of 2017, the growth rates are now in the 25% to 40% range even though they’re on top of larger bases. We’re over 60 employees today.

Sramana Mitra: These 60 are all in Canada.

Rob Douglas: Yes, in our corporate office in Toronto.

Sramana Mitra: This is a founder-financed company.

Rob Douglas: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I love the strategy that you described. Is there anything else you’d like to elaborate?

Rob Douglas: In our journey so far, we’ve had three pivots. The other thing that I found is that we have had a great willingness with the requirements of pivots. Either market acceptance of lack of acceptance caused those pivots. Each of those decisions were fairly gut wrenching. Every time, it’s always worked out.

Sramana Mitra: In the story that you described, at what points did you do those pivots and why?

Rob Douglas: Early on, we had a very significant pivot. We went into a very specific plan. We learned, inside of two years, that we were dead wrong and had to re-test all of our assumptions. We pivoted halfway through this journey. Even as much as a year and a half ago, we found ourselves in need of a pivot.

This last one was a realization that there’s actually a much larger market opportunity for our technology. It caused us to really think about how to replicate what we’ve done into what is becoming a much larger market. I’ll define it as digital trust. How do you authenticate identity in the digital world? That is growing very rapidly.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. Congratulations. I’m excited about the company journey that you described. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping with Sophisticated Strategy: Rob Douglas, CEO of BioConnect
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