Bootstraps First to $5M ARR, Raises $10M Later: Toucan Toco CEO Charles Miglietti (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your strategy?

Charles Miglietti: What we are building right now. We are building a series of ready-to-use applications that will be plugged into existing systems. As we provide the very top layer of the visualization, we can build business applications that rely on any existing ERP or any existing system.

In terms of strategy, we have a vertical approach to target specific businesses that use a specific system.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me a bit of the competitive landscape? Visualization is not an open field. There are players in that. 

Charles Miglietti: It’s very crowded. You have big players like Tableau or ClickView. What we have found is a unique positioning at the very last mile of the value chain of the data.

As we focus on UX, simplicity, and communication, we are between the local application world and the BI world. This is where we managed to find really good positioning.

Sramana Mitra: Can you put players like Tableau and Alteryx in context? Do you see these players in deals?

Charles Miglietti: We see Tableau a lot. Alteryx is completely different as it’s an ETL tool. All our customers already own a tool like Tableau. At the end, Toucan Toco is complementary to what they have today. We have positioned ourselves on communicating the data to non-technicals.

Our mission is to deliver data and insights to non-technical people. This is where we are very good. The UX is so simple and intuitive that it provides much more impact when they deliver the application. It’s unlike what they could do with traditional software like Tableau.

Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to do this as a bootstrapped company and not raise financing until this point. Could you explain what your thinking is?

Charles Miglietti: Our thinking was to go as far as we can by ourselves and to focus on product-market fit and product scalability. We only will raise money once we reach that point.

Sramana Mitra: You feel like you have reached that point now?

Charles Miglietti: Yes. We have a product that’s ready to scale. We have a sales strategy that is very clear. We have proven the positioning and the product-market fit. We believe that we are now ready to scale. We are ready to spend money wisely to generate growth.

Sramana Mitra: How much are you trying to raise?

Charles Miglietti: We just raised $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: What are you going to do differently with $10 million?

Charles Miglietti: We will hire new people for new countries like the US and Netherlands. We will hire people for customer focus.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the team?

Charles Miglietti: 70 people.

Sramana Mitra: Very good bootstrapping story. We have a very clear philosophy of bootstrap first and raise money later. You’ve done a very good job of that. Congratulations.

Charles Miglietti: Thank you.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstraps First to $5M ARR, Raises $10M Later: Toucan Toco CEO Charles Miglietti
1 2 3 4