Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you started in 2012, how did you get your business off the ground?

Mike Whitmire: When I started, I was just a senior accountant. I had no money. I had no entrepreneurial experience. My first line of thinking was, “If I’m going to start a SaaS company, I’d probably need to take venture funding to be taken seriously and get some early customers.” Heading into this, I was operating under that assumption.

Sramana Mitra: Which is, by the way, the common fallacy in the market. Everybody thinks that if you wake up and you want to start a company, you need to go out and raise money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth, but that is fallacy that the industry operates with.

Mike Whitmire: You’re not going to go out and get money on day one. I got introduced to a startup accelerator in Los Angeles by the name of Amplify LA. I went down at the end of 2012 and met with them. I just had lunch with a couple of the partners and was discussing the pain point and the idea. Their response was good. The problem was they just can’t give me money. I needed a co-founder. I needed a product. I needed customers.

Over the course of the next six months, I met my co-founder Cullen Zandstra who’s our CTO now. We built the first iteration of our product and then I got our first customer on board. Like I said, that was about a six-month process. In July of 2013, I went back down to Amplify and pitched on our progress. They went ahead and let us in the program. We just raised a small amount of $50,000 to get us off the ground.

Sramana Mitra: Amplify is an accelerator?

Mike Whitmire: Yes. They’ve been around for about seven years or so at this point. They have an office in a pretty prime location in Venice.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do before you got to Amplify? Did you build a prototype? Did you have any customer validation before you went?

Mike Whitmire: The first time I met them, I just went in there cold with a pitch. The idea was to understand whether the investment community would be engaged in this. I didn’t want to put in a bunch of time and effort into getting a prototype built before validating.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do any customer validation or were you going by your own experience of having encountered that problem?

Mike Whitmire: I didn’t do as much validation as a lot of entrepreneurs do. I talked to my network but honestly, I knew that all of my clients had this problem. When I moved into Cornerstone, it gave me an insight into why they have this problem. Honestly, I had the confidence. I did validate it with about a dozen or so accountants in my network.

What I actually found really interesting was when I was recruiting my co-founder, he was very much into validation. He went to his own network and tried to find as many accountants that he possibly could and did his own validation. He was coming from a very independent perspective. He ultimately got comfortable with moving forward with the idea after speaking with about half a dozen accountants or so. That’s when we started working on the product.

Sramana Mitra: You’re positioning the same product for the mid-market.

Mike Whitmire: The way I like to describe it is, we’re trying to solve the same problem but we’ve taken fundamentally different approaches to solving that problem.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire
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