Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a particular segment of companies that you went after?

Ryan Fyfe: There was. I took a very online, digital marketing-first approach. From that perspective, these were early adopters or maybe businesses that were forward thinking in terms of moving their businesses to the cloud before that became a real thing. Beyond that, a common thread was around SMBs. I’d always work with small businesses. That was the segment that I knew.

The thought of enterprise back then was scary. I didn’t want to get on the phone and talk with people. From a vertical p erspective, we were always vertical agnostic. We still are, to this day. There’s not a lot of differentiation between a restaurant and a retail store when it comes to their schedule. When it comes to other parts of their businesses, there is. We remain vertical agnostic from a vertical standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting this company off the ground, how did you finance it? Was it bootstrapped? Did you raise money?

Ryan Fyfe: From my time in internet marketing, I was lucky to be able to put away some cash. I bought a couple of properties fairly young. That eventually became my seed capital. I was able to fund myself and the business for a couple of years. We already figured out product-market fit when I initially raised the first seed round.

Looking back, I got incredibly lucky. I was just focused on the product and customers. An angel investor reached out to me from Europe. I was familiar with Zendesk, the company that he’d invested in. It was about almost a year later when we closed the seed round. Kristof Jans became a very influential member for me and a personal mentor. He was really influential in helping our company in the early years.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about the time window between when you launched the company and when this European investor reach out to you. How long was it?

Ryan Fyfe: It was about nine months.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you have in that nine-month period?

Ryan Fyfe: The first nine months were pretty slow. Probably 20 to 30 customers. The next year, a couple of hundred customers. I think a lot of people think that SaaS businesses will be online quicker. Not everyone gets to view the first couple of years of hard work that people do before things become a success. There’s a lot of time in there trying to figure out product-market fit and working closely with your first customers to really figure out how to grow them and acquire more of them.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe
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