Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you sell? Selling faculty-by-faculty and direct door-to-door is not a viable scalable model. How did you actually get to market?

Josh Kamrath: To answer your question directly, we were selling direct door-to-door. Then we evolved into selling more enterprise-oriented deals. Instead of going to individual faculty, we would go to directors of technology.

We’ve started to transition into more of a partnership model. That’s our model now where we fully pivoted away from selling to individual faculty or even individual schools. Now what we do is plug our software into somebody else’s platform and power a video assessment as part of a larger story or narrative.

To go back to your adding-people question, we added a handful of salespeople early on, which didn’t work out. A lot of organizations do this where they haven’t figured out why they truly matter to the market. They haven’t answered that question. They try to hire salespeople before the founders or the entrepreneurial people understand what their real value is to the world.

We were one of those companies that also did that where we tried to hire three or four different high-caliber salespeople before we found out why we matter. None of those salespeople really made it.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very common situation. When that didn’t work out, what happened? How did you manage to continue selling and growing?

Josh Kamrath: Like you just suggested, we have been successful selling faculty to faculty. It just doesn’t really scale. We were still cash flowing the business just by doing that. But we always knew that we would never grow as big as we want to unless we change something.

We changed our go-to-market. Instead of selling to individual faculty or individual universities, now we go and approach other EdTech companies that are larger than us where there’s some strategic value add.

Cengage, D2L, Top Hat, Toolwire, and Sage Publishing are our partners where we basically take our video assessment technology and plug it in or white label it effectively into some other larger platform. Bongo powers the video assessment that happens to be a large part of the story in any of those partners or products.

It allows Bongo to have access to massive channels. D2L, for instance, has something like 15 million users worldwide. For us to gain access to that user base, it would take an army of salespeople.

What D2L gets out of the equation is they can lean on us to focus on our core competency, which is the video technology and the experiential exercises. So it’s not just the video but the workflows around the video that matter. We found this symbiotic relationship with these partners.

Sramana Mitra: How much of your revenue comes out of partner sales in this mode that you just described?

Josh Kamrath: Probably more than 90%.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath
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