Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to launch this product?

Tyler Eyamie: I have a champagne bottle cork in my office that says 11/11/11. It was November 11, 2011, when our first viable product went into the market. That was a humbling experience.

We put it out very quickly thinking about the fundamentals that Steve Blank preaches about the minimal viable product. We were fortunate enough to get our first paying customer early in December of 2011 that year.

Soon, we were able to get a couple of customers who were paying us small amounts through the platform that helped test and play around with it. In those days, we were reiterating over and over again based on the feedback from those customers.

It was not just based on one aspect from one customer. We validated it across a few different customers. It kept coming back to us – that same thesis that the platform from other vendors is too big and the other few in the market at that time weren’t for the B2B payment and billing side of things. That white space is where we decided to get laser focused. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the go-to-market strategy that worked for you? What was the process that got you to that strategy?

Tyler Eyamie: Our entire background is what I call inbound inside sales. Marketing’s job would be to deliver some kind of a lead to the sales team, which would then qualify a potential customer and bring them on board. In our early days, we built a nice and repeatable inbound inside sales machine.

Think of early days Hubspot go-to market strategy where we wanted to keep our cost of sale down. The average revenue for a customer was not large enough to validate a big enterprise type sale.

Our marketing team was one person whose job was to put out content, use Google pay-per-click, get on app directories, and develop a digital strategy to drive folks to our website. Those folks would, at some point, sign up for a free trial and then the sales representative, which was myself, would try to get those customers impressed enough to where they would sign up and more importantly, to determine what the ones that didn’t sign up were looking for. That has helped us start to develop a long-term product roadmap strategy.

We were waiting for quantifiable data to know if revenue recognition and automation matters for the market that we are looking at. We wanted to spend time there to solve a pain point. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you be a bit granular in one aspect of this strategy that you described? Who did you go after? You wanted inbound leads, but as we know to generate relevant inbound leads, you need to do something so that the right types of people come to you.

What was the strategy that you applied to get those people to come and find out about you?

Tyler Eyamie: This was about who our target users are. For us, it was small to medium enterprises. These are folks just like us where the CEO founder is the sales rep, building agent, and the finance person.

We started to develop a lot of content around the pain points of an entrepreneur and their journey. We created a lot of content about why an automated billing system can make their day better. It was a content strategy, but we also found that there was traffic on Google for people looking for a subscription or SaaS billing.

We had a content strategy where we were putting out pieces and trying to get our name seen by other entrepreneurs or C-level resources of small to medium enterprises. We also had the Google side of things where we turned the dial up with a specific budget each day.

Both those two strategies drove traffic and conversion into the business. It was a two-pronged approach in the early days. I’d be very careful about recommending the Google train because it is very expensive. Someone who doesn’t know what they are doing can end up spending a lot of money there. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie
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