Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 2)

Tyler Eyamie: I had an entrepreneurial hunger to go out and try to build a business on my own. One of the things that I had as an advantage over most entrepreneurs was that I could potentially go for several years with no salary.

The other thing that I had was access to tremendous talented people who had helped Protus grow and get acquired. They were also trying to figure out what to do next. I had years of trust and experience working with these people.

My co-founder Greg Burwell and I sat down and examined where the bottlenecks for Protius were as it started to scale. We determined that it was the billing system. Protus scaled from 0 to 550,000 monthly subscribers on what we call a homegrown billing solution that was built by one of the founders in 1999.

When the company was acquired in 2010, eight full-time employees were working with this piece of software. It was the monthly billing and collection engine. It was a very slow-moving billing system that if the company wanted agility to test new pricing plans, it would take weeks and months to complete the loop on that.

We thought that there had to be a better way to provide fast growing software to service companies that would allow them to be agile with respect to how they want to go to market.

Sramana Mitra: When were you coming to this conclusion that you wanted to start a company around this premise?

Tyler Eyamie: It was 2010 to 2011 when we were out of Protus mode and into the entrepreneurial mode. We were doing a lot of detective work around what growing SaaS companies pay for this billing system.

We took a look at the market and saw a variety of options with a lot of venture funds being thrown at it but no real de facto choice for small to medium SaaS companies with an agile billing platform. We jumped in headfirst.

The first few years is what I would call customer development. We were talking to anybody we could speak to from SaaS companies. We were testing our thesis on a lightweight, agile billing platform offered in a SaaS type model. We were trying to build up an interesting base of customers who are interested in the product that we have developed.

We were fortunate to bring in some venture funding about one year into our journey. That would be the seed round by today’s standard. It brought validation to us that we were building the right thing. For us, it was all about asking customers and then testing as opposed to building it to attract a customer, which I don’t recommend.

For us, it was a minimum viable product. We got it to market and kept on testing, tweaking, and learning. Fast forward, we brought it almost $10 million of venture funding over the last nine years. 

Sramana Mitra: Nine years, so that means you started in 2011? 

Tyler Eyamie: Yes. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie
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