Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2016, you got a chunk of financing and you had over $1 million in ARR already. What happens next? What is the major inflection point in this business?

Tyler Eyamie: A big thing for us was hiring a Chief Revenue Officer and VP Marketing to help take that company to the next level. We wanted to find a better product-market fit.

We decided as a company to fight our battles in the midmarket area, to take the power of that platform, and make our UI easier to use. Doing this meant decreasing our starter package. Our lowest price of entry went down from $500 a month to about $99 a month. We were testing if we could use more channels and levers than just the pay, demand, spend, and content strategy to build a much bigger business.

Most importantly, once you raise venture capital, the clocks start ticking with regards to cash in the bank and cash runway. Our goal again was to thoughtfully build the executive team, beef up product, and find a better product-market fit.

It took us almost a year after Series A to figure out our true sweet spot, which is anywhere from companies that have revenue of $1 million to $1 billion. These were businesses that were growing and they had some kind of manual billing which includes humans or they have a homegrown system and they are trying to step themselves up to scale and grow their business to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers are you at now?

Tyler Eyamie: We’re right around 400 customers right now. 

Sramana Mitra: How does that split between the midmarket versus the smaller companies?

Tyler Eyamie: We have three key buckets that we talk to. One, we have the startups which have zero to $1 million. Second, we have rapid growth companies that are at $1 million to $100 million. Third, we have enterprises that have revenue of over $100 million.

About 50% of our business is in the middle bucket, which is the small to medium enterprise. Meanwhile, 20% of the client base is in the large enterprise segment. We closed a customer last year that was over $1 billion and a couple of customers around that range.

The remaining 30% would be in those early startups. Those early startups are companies with revenue. Generally, companies don’t come to us if they don’t have any revenue at all unless they are a smaller division of a large enterprise. 

Sramana Mitra: Have you raised more money beyond that 2016 funding round?

Tyler Eyamie: We have not. We have been fortunate enough to work with the government programs here in Canada as well as the banking programs to fund the business. We are a smaller company with about 40 employees. We expect to end this year with ARR at just under $10 million. 

Sramana Mitra: There are plenty of financing options available for SaaS companies. If you have recurring revenue, you can use that very easily. I imagine that is what you are doing.

Tyler Eyamie: We were working with one of the biggest banks here in Canada that does have an operating line and is based on our MRR. We’re good for cash for quite some time and coming into this year, we were looking at fall 2020 to do our true Series B round.

Global pandemic kicked in and we had to change gears to focus on extending the runway. I won’t go down there unless you want me to talk about it. 

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie
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