Bootstrapping from Denmark: Camilla Ley Valentin, Co-Founder of Queue-It (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did the US business start happening in your evolution? You started in 2010. At what time did the US business take off?

Camilla Ley Valentin: I would say two to three years into the company.

Sramana Mitra: What strategic nuance did you make to catalyze the growth of the US business?

Camilla Ley Valentin: One of our growth enablers is the queue page – the page that people see when they’re in the waiting room. This is the main enabler for us. As soon as we have a couple of customers in a certain geography, that bridges into a new country. What we’ve done, specifically to cater to the US, is we’ve decided early on that we want to keep it simple and keep all our communication in English only. That alone makes some countries less interested in what we do because everything is provided in English.

We also make it easy for American companies to contact us as we created a US phone number early on. You can do that with services online so that people can easily get in touch with us without necessarily having the ability to call internationally. Some companies have a policy where a lot of their employees can’t dial international numbers.

In order to make that easy and to signal that we are interested in the US market space, we created a US number that people could call us on even before we had an office in the US. That was one thing we did on a more practical level to cater to the US market. When we talk about e-commerce and ticketing topics on our website and on our social media, we try to do it with a US angle.

As an example, we’ll talk a lot about Black Friday, which for a number of years has been a very American phenomenon. Now it’s spread to more parts of the world but it’s mainly a US thing. We do it now in our communication and also in the outreach that we do.

Sramana Mitra: Is your business mostly inside sales or do you have bag-carrying sales people as well?

Camilla Ley Valentin: It’s inside sales.

Sramana Mitra: The US inside sales business that you do, is that out of the US or out of Denmark?

Camilla Ley Valentin: Now it’s out of the US. We opened our US office in Minneapolis in the summer of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In the subsequent rounds of financing that you’ve raised, did you raise that money in Europe or did you raise some money in the US as well?

Camilla Ley Valentin: The funding was raised in Copenhagen.

Sramana Mitra: So your entire funding is from Copenhagen?

Camilla Ley Valentin: We don’t have much funding. We’ve been very capital efficient.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping from Denmark: Camilla Ley Valentin, Co-Founder of Queue-It
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