Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you got to May 2009, how many of these 20,000 people who looked at this became customers?

Gero Decker: Not many. The 20,000 people were not really interested in the notion of business process per se. They were rather interested in the notion of having a graphical design environment on the web. A small fraction of them actually stayed happy users. From this initial set of customers, we might have converted maybe 20 or 30 over time. They were just tech enthusiasts who just wanted to check out the technology.

Sramana Mitra: Did anybody convert into a customer?

Gero Decker: Out of these initial users?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Gero Decker: Yes. Over time, probably around 30. When we talk about customers, we talk about organizations, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Gero Decker: We typically sign contracts with different organizations. For example, the German railway became a customer later on.

Sramana Mitra: In the timeframe that we are talking, we are in the beginning of 2009?

Gero Decker: In May 2009, we incorporated the company. We only built the company under two preconditions. Precondition number one was, we wanted to get a little bit of money through universities to fund servers or even more so, that we would find the first paying customer.

The first paying customer ended up being the biggest health insurance company. It’s called AOK. They have roughly 30% market share so they are massive. They’re not known at all outside of Germany. We had come to know them in 2008. They were having a similar challenge like the guys from the German railway services. They were heavily restructuring their company after several rounds of M&A. We had a good relationship with them. They wanted to switch out the old product they had and go for the collaborative cloud product.

They basically were our reference over the course of most of 2009. We had a major customer with a check waiting for us. They promised to pay €100,000 if we could deliver what we promised on our slide deck. It was fall of 2009 when we delivered and they paid €100,000 for the system.

Sramana Mitra: How many of you were working on this project while you had this one anchor customer?

Gero Decker: It was the four founders and a couple of interns.

Sramana Mitra: What were the specifics? Can you describe what was in the software?

Gero Decker: The software was basically a planning system for that health insurance company. It allowed them to map out processes as they are today and how they would change going forward. For example, how they are today and the different regional divisions that they wanted to harmonize. They were also implementing a new IT system which also had a lot of change. This was one piece which was mapping out how the operating model would change.

The other thing that they were really interested in is capacity planning. They didn’t have a good handle on how many people they actually needed in the organization. They mapped in detail the difference in time requirements and activities. How do customer demographics change over the next three to six months? Having a basic model that tells you how many people we will need over time so they could plan recruiting or plan retraining. This was the main focus for them – redesigning the organization and capacity planning.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7