Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

John Stewart: It’s based on per user per month.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average deal size when you’re selling to one of your clients?

John Stewart: It varies by segment. We have as little as a single license at a non-profit to as many as thousands at a global 50 brand. It’s everything in between.

Sramana Mitra: What is the bulk of the business?

John Stewart: By logo, it would mostly be SMB. By revenue, it would be mostly enterprise. We have over 75,000 users of our products worldwide across 2,100 logos.

Sramana Mitra: The first revenue out of MapAnything started coming in 2013?

John Stewart: 2012.

Sramana Mitra: The financing you raised was after the MapAnything business started generating revenues.

John Stewart: Correct. By the time we raised financing, MapAnything was doing about $2.5 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. That was in 2013?

John Stewart: That was in 2015 when we raised our financing. It was a $7.3 million Series A.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? You already described a number of evolutions. The first one is the fact that you started as a services company. Then somewhere along the way, you had four products that you came up with based on your services clients requirements.

Then one of them really took off. You started building up that business and turned off the services business and focused on MapAnything. We are now at the end of 2015. Your MapAnything is over $2 million in revenue and you have raised Series A financing. What is the next major step?

John Stewart: We started building add-on products to MapAnything. These were things like complex multi-day routings, scheduling, integrated telematics. That’s what we did over a year. We raised a $33 million Series B in January of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: By the time you raised Series B, what were you doing in terms of metrics?

John Stewart: Considerable.

Sramana Mitra: Over $10 million?

John Stewart: By the time we raised B, it was close.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting? From somebody reading this story and trying to learn, what else is worth discussing in that trajectory of how you went about doing this business?

John Stewart: There’re a couple of takeaways. If you’re going to be a services business, be a services business. If you’re going to be a software company, be a software company. I  see a lot of people in my space who want to transition from being services to software but they’re not willing to give up one for the other. If you believe that there’s a business there, you should definitely chase it and focus on it.

The second thing is, one of the things we’ve done really well is, we’ve constantly invested in our brand equity. Especially early on, I think a lot of times companies are reluctant to actually spend dollars on marketing until they have a line of revenue to justify it. If you don’t do that, it’s like a chicken and egg thing. You got to invest in that as well. Another thing is that at every stage of a company, you have to bring in the right team members around you. That’s going to change over time. The person that brought you to one stage of the company is not necessarily the person that’s going to get to the next stage.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrap First with Services, Raise Money Later: John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything
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