Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 4)

Joshua Strebel: We really enjoy those complex, harder, and out-of-the-normal WordPress workflow cases. There’s also this site called bringatrailer.com. These are a couple of entrepreneurs that probably invite you for one of these interviews. They started with a little online auto auction site and now they’ve gone on to become one of the premier private auction online destinations. They came to us with the requirement of one server and they’re now on 14 or 15 servers. We have them load out across all this hardware to sustain their huge and ever growing traffic footprint.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What percentage of your business is product versus service? You said you do a lot of custom work.

Joshua Strebel: When I say custom work, it’s mostly just in the architecture design going into the product.

Sramana Mitra: But you charge for that, right?

Joshua Strebel: Actually, we don’t. The way we’ve decided to serve our customers is they come to us with a problem set and we describe the solution with an associated monthly cost. They say yes and then we build that solution and it’s just retained in that monthly cost as they go. It works well for us because our customers like that predictable annualized billing. So, we build up a little profit into the front of the deal and just maintain that through the whole way.

Sramana Mitra: To do these enterprise deals, obviously, your marketing and sales strategy are now different. How do you acquire customers?

Joshua Strebel: In the old days, it was certainly like fishing with a net. We try to cast the net wide and appeal to all these personas. That obviously doesn’t work because we need to hunt with a spear now. We need to be very targeted. To grow a high volume business at a low end, you might need a thousand customers a month. We only need 10 to 30 customers a month at the deal size that we have so we can be very strategic on how we approach and talk to them.

Believe it or not, the marketing side is still hard for us. We still have a challenge in front of us to get in front of a CIO or CMO at one of these major corporations. We’re getting better at that, but we still survive primarily on inbound. We have such a good reputation in this space and have established this great credibility that 90% of our leads come in through word of mouth and referral.

The sales process is certainly dramatically different. In the old days, you’d just click a button and signup with your credit card. Now, there’s a two to eight months of life cycle and is predominantly based around legal. When you’re dealing with some of these brands that you might find on our homepage, you bet they have 30-person deep legal departments and every one of them has a say on what the contract looks like.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely
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