Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It was basically content marketing and search engine optimization that you used to get that traffic. 

Tyler Eyamie: That is correct. That was a great way to summarize my answer. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you do in your first year? In terms of business models, pricing models, average sales price, what kind of assumptions were you working with at that point when you got the product to market and started selling?

Tyler Eyamie: In the early days, we were looking for customers who would spend hundreds of dollars a month on our platform. 

Sramana Mitra: I was asking about the average sale price as well as the business model, pricing model, and average size.

Tyler Eyamie: In the first two years of operations, it was about $210 per month for a typical customer. In our first year, it was less than a hundred dollars of sales with our first two customers in December. We were still in our customer and product development mode at that time.

The entire go-to market for our first five to six years and even our series A thesis was all around inbound inside sales to make our unit economics great. All the SaaS metrics were right in line as well to facilitate that series A investment in 2016. 

Sramana Mitra: Was it five years from your start to series A? How did you finance those five years?

Tyler Eyamie: The first year was founder-funded, and then we were fortunate enough to do two seed rounds of about $3 million in total. Those were led by institutional investors. The year 2016 was the true Series A.

Sramana Mitra: Was it Canadian investors?

Tyler Eyamie: In the first two rounds, yes. The second round was co-led by a Canadian institutional investor as well as a US-based family office. 

Sramana Mitra: When you went in to raise Series A with your self financing and the two seed rounds, did it add up to about $4 million in total?

Tyler Eyamie: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: What were your metrics? What kinds of revenue levels and numbers of customers did you have? What were you showing the series A investor?

Tyler Eyamie: We were well over $1 million in annual revenue. We had somewhere around 100 customers on the platform of various sizes. Our thesis was a few things. The founders, through brute force, got the company to that level.

First, we wanted to diversify the executive team because at the time it was just the two of us. Second, we wanted to hone in on repeatable product-market fit from a marketing to sales success factor. Those were the two big theses around it.

For us, our customer acquisition cost and customer payback were 11 to 12 months. It was pretty good for an early stage SaaS type company. Our pool at the time for an average customer was around $3,500 a year. We wanted to beef up the team, beef up the go-to-market, and beef up the product. 

Sramana Mitra: How much were you raising in that Series A?

Tyler Eyamie: Our goal was $4 to $6 million. We were fortunate to raise $6 million. It took seven to eight months. We met with 50 different investors. We were fortunate enough to have a strong syndicate behind us with the existing investing group.

We wanted to ensure that we were choosing the right partner for the business because when you decide to get married to a VC, it’s not a one- or two-year relationship; it’s an eight to ten-year relationship. They have to be people that you like personally but more importantly, they have to add some value to the business. It took a while to figure out who the right ones were for us to work with. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie
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