Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2009. Did you have clients from your previous business that you sold this concept to be able to sign on as your validation partners? How many were they?

Brian Robertson: Yes, we had three or four cornerstone clients. 

Sramana Mitra: Describe the validation process that you did at that point in your career. You are a mature entrepreneur. You have client relationships, domain knowledge, and you are starting a new company. Did you have paid customers right away, or did you build something and got this customer to pay after? What was the sequence of this validation stage in building your business?

Brian Robertson: When it comes down to it, I’m a bootstrapper. You just have to deliver great service to a client. Earlier as a consultant, I’d talked to people about doing it with some software and did it on the back of a contract. I did the same thing with Visiquate.

When you do enterprise software sales, key ingredients of success are your reputation, how you engage with people, the power of your network, and earning trusted advisor status. I’ve always been focused on client intimacy, developing deep relationships with clients, making clients heroes, and understanding their perspective in where they are coming from and what their strategic imperatives and their tactical objectives are.

The healthcare industry is big. It’s one of those classic dynamics where it’s also small. The network is small. You deliver value for people to place a bet. 

Sramana Mitra: We have a methodology that we use that requires the kind of dynamics that you are talking about. We call it bootstrapping with services. Many companies including Oracle have been built in this mode. We have case study after case study.

I think you are another case study of that. As you said, it does require domain knowledge and a trusted advisory relationship so that people are willing to write you contracts in which you can develop your software.

Brian Robertson: Absolutely, bootstrapping as a service. 

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to develop a version one product from 2009?

Brian Robertson: It took less than a year. We used different technologies. We had done it before and we know the domain and datasets so well. It was a situation where we took a fresh look at what service-oriented architecture could bring to the table in terms of different plug-and-play modules and use cases where we could use Postgres instead of SQL server.

We looked at the best-of-breed and relevance in the data logic layer and the visualization layer. A big part of our vision was to deliver an experience to clients. Historically, it has been said that enterprise BI software, particularly around analytics, sucks.

Our vision was to give our clients more of a retail experience. When you are using an iPad or Netflix, it’s visually stimulating with high fidelity and it has great use of color. We asked ourselves, “What if we deliver that experience to corporate software?”

That’s actually where the name Visiquate comes from. To equate through visualization. That’s an important part of our brand. It has to be high fidelity. A picture is worth a thousand words. It is kind of like the Bloomberg Terminal in financial services. You have to be able to look at a receivables portfolio or a supply chain portfolio and see where all the risks are in that portfolio.

This includes key diagrams, outliers, and scatter diagrams to show where opportunities are. A big part of what we are known for is making sure that there is visual science on top of the data science.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson
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