Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 3)

Jeff Solomon: A buddy of mine went to get his MBA. He was also an engineer. He was working on the side for me. When he graduated, the one thing that he learned was that to build a scalable business, you needed an asset.

Sramana Mitra: Not just services.

Jeff Solomon: He came to me and said, “This service business is cool, but you need to do something that is going to have some real equity value. He suggested a SaaS business. I went to look at all the projects I’ve been doing. I saw some similarities. We were doing a lot of the same things for a lot of similar clients. I started to think about a SaaS application that we could build for these people. That was how Velocify was born. We worked nights and weekends on Velocify while we were consulting for other companies. After six months, we launched this SaaS lead management platform.

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking 2007?

Jeff Solomon: We started building in late 2004. We launched in 2005.

Sramana Mitra: So there were players like Salesforce. What would be different in this?

Jeff Solomon: Largely, the existing tools were targeting B2B clients. Fortuitously, the clients that I was servicing were B2C. They were selling their services to consumers, largely in the financial services space. The process for selling to a consumer is quite different than selling to a business. That became our unique set of features. Our product was better than Salesforce. It was better for the kind of companies we were selling to. It also limited us.

We wanted to sell to Salesforce, but our client base wasn’t as interesting to them. In terms of finding that niche where you can really address a need in a specialized way, we were able to do that for those companies. Another timing element was the mortgage industry was on fire. We owned that space. Everybody that was selling subprime mortgages used our product.

Sramana Mitra: You go into the customers you had for your consulting services business before?

Jeff Solomon: Those were the first clients. I had maybe three or four mortgage companies that were clients. That spread from there.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging for this?

Jeff Solomon: It was cheaper than it is today. We were in the range of $20 to $30 per seat. We started out with a per seat model. In the early days, we were doing whatever we could just to get customers on the platform. Most of our clients had somewhere between 10 and 20 seats.

Sramana Mitra: Small-sized.

Jeff Solomon: Yes. As the market continued to expand in mortgage, we started bringing on bigger banks and mortgage companies in upwards of a thousand seats. Our price point raised. By the time I left as CEO, we were in the $80 per seat with the average client having 30 seats.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon
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