Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did the business grow as you brought that North American sales channel together? How did North America contribute to your revenue?

Gero Decker: By now, they’re at roughly 25%. The lion’s share is still from Europe. We also have operations in Asia Pacific. It’s roughly 25% North America and 10% Asia Pacific. The rest is in Europe.

Sramana Mitra: What did you end 2017 with?

Gero Decker: We ended up north of $21 million ARR.

Sramana Mitra: Were there any strategic moves that we haven’t discussed yet that drove that growth?

Gero Decker: We professionalize the go-to market team considerably. We established a new function that we didn’t have before. We put pre-sales in place which we didn’t have before. Before, a sales guy would have to do everything from start to finish – even managing an account on an ongoing basis. Basically, they are switching from a generalist role to a more specialized role.

Also we built customer success in 2016 for the first time and drastically reduced churn and improved customer satisfaction at that time. In 2017, we had the amazing number of less than 2% of gross churn, excluding up sells and cross sells which can be traced back to our initiatives in customer success.

Sramana Mitra: Any other funding after that 2015 round?

Gero Decker: We just announced a smaller Series B funding. That just went over the wire earlier today. We took on an additional $15.5 million fresh capital to fund the further expansion.

Sramana Mitra: Was it American investors?

Gero Decker: Same investors.

Sramana Mitra: Then my next question is if you look at the current business, how is it spread in terms of the footprint in terms of the organization. Where is the bulk of the operations? Where is engineering? Where is product?

Gero Decker: We have roughly 240 people in the company now. They are distributed over eight office locations. The biggest one, by far, is Germany. All engineers are here. Our second biggest team is the US team with 25 people. The other six locations are rather small, typically with half a dozen people. These are London, Paris, Switzerland, Singapore, Melbourne, and Amsterdam.

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do in the 2018 timeframe? What kind of numbers are you forecasting? Do you want to sell the company? What kind of competition are you seeing?

Gero Decker: If we wanted to sell the company, we could have done so a long time ago. We had a number of offers on the table and we always rejected them right away. This is not what’s driving us. What’s driving us is building a strong software company and basically testing how far we can take it. Our goal is to build a sustainable company that does not require to do an exit but that stands by itself as a self-sufficient company for a long time to come.

The other aspect is, we have the feeling that we’re just scratching the surface and that we’re just learning how to run. Yes, we have pretty good penetration in the countries where we started earliest. Most people know us. In most other markets where we’re active, we’re still getting started. We’re still in a super early phase. There’s a lot of potential for what we do. We serve a wide variety of industry verticals. We are typically relevant to most organizations with at least 500 employees. The number of companies that we can help is massive.

Is the market there? Absolutely. Will the demand for the types of product that we have go away anytime soon? Not at all. We’re one of the early cloud native players taking the collaborative approach. We are in tune with where the market goes. The main challenge is executing on what we have and bringing the product portfolio all the way to the customer and then working with them to make them successful.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio
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