Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much of your old customer base from MedeFinance came into Visiquate? 

Brian Robertson: Not too many. Mede is still a friend of mine and I’m a shareholder, so we were in a situation that just sometimes happens. Sometimes you have certain relationships that follow you wherever you go. I only needed a couple of cornerstone clients that believed in me and my team.

We needed a couple to get started but that’s the beauty of healthcare – the market is so big that it just became a competitive landscape. We do compete with Mede and the others, but there are a lot of markets to go around.

Half the time, we are also cross-pollinating – this notion of co-op competition and people partnering. It’s like when Oracle and Microsoft competed head to head on certain deals, but in other deals, Oracle is the persistence layer and Microsoft might be the BI layer.

We also architected Visiquate to be technologically plug-and-play friendly and flexible. Consultative selling requires that you’ve got flexibility and adaptability in your relationships and your technology stack in the way you design offerings. 

Sramana Mitra: What were the average deal sizes? 

Brian Robertson: I talk about the T-shirt size model. We have small, medium, large, and extra large. Deal sizes can be anywhere from $25,000 a month to over $100,000 a month depending on who the client is. Our price is a combination of data size and complexity because we effectively become their data hosting providers.

We have data size and complexity, the number of users seats, power users, consumer users, and then service plans. Since we do the daily data integration, ETL as a service or data integration as a service, there’s a service plan typically attached to that and consulting.

They might buy our revenue cycle analytics solution, and they might also want to consult because they have a lot of goals and objectives. They want our solution and they also want us to help them achieve their goals. That’s a logical extension of what we do because we know their data as much as they do.

Sometimes our clients say that we know their data more than they do. That gives us an opportunity to be data-centric in our consulting offerings versus traditional consulting. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the business? Is it more of a large deal business or a midsize deal business? 

Brian Robertson: I’d say a medium average. If we are going to go with the T-shirt size analogy, the median average is somewhere between medium and large. We do our best work for large enterprises when we are working with multiple data sets, and multiple layers of complexities because we are big data guys. 

Sramana Mitra: So it’s half a million plus deal for average annual deal size? 

Brian Robertson: Yes. 

Sramana Mitra: What has been the experience in building this company? Is it bootstrapped? Did you raise money? What was the strategy that you followed?

Brian Robertson: It’s very similar to what I did before. It started with founders and members of the executive team writing checks followed by friends, families, and angels. We had one strategic fund through a client relationship and we had some light VC for less than $5 million. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the chronology? How much money came from founder equity plus angel investor?

Brian Robertson: I would say we had $10 million in paid-in capital to date. We’ve been capital efficient. You could say that half of the money has been through founders, friends, and family. The other half has been VCs and strategic partners. All at various points in 11 years. 

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson
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