Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the skillset of that employee that you brought in?

Peter Ord: He was a fellow sales leader. I was supporting the product.

Sramana Mitra: The agency that you were working with was maintaining the product.

Peter Ord: Right. We were selling and getting more customers. Todd, who was that first employee, came to me and said, “I don’t have the time to support this. I can’t handle these calls. We need to find an operations person.” That’s when I hired my third employee in December of 2018. He’s won CEO of the Year from Silicon Slopes in Utah.

Sramana Mitra: In December 2018, what revenue level did you reach?

Peter Ord: $400,000 of ARR. That’s around the time I accepted the first round of funding from friends and family.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Peter Ord: $1 million.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2019?

Peter Ord: We grew from three to 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: All in Utah?

Peter Ord: Yes. We raised a seed funding round from a VC in July of 2019 for $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: So $3 million is the total capital in at this point.

Peter Ord: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: In the 20 people, what did you bring in? Did you bring in the technical piece at this point?

Peter Ord: We did. I knew that if I was ever was going to raise a professional round of funding, I needed that domain knowledge. We still currently use that dev shop, but that only represents 10% of the total output of work. I hired a Director of Engineering who is now my CTO. That was in March 2019. At the end of 2019, we had five engineers.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you reach in 2019?

Peter Ord: We went up to $1.5 million. We raised our seed round in July 2019. That helped us push the needle. We were creating a category. The main products we were replacing were generic project management tools.

There was no one in the market that had our value proposition, which was a blessing and a curse. It meant that we had to educate the market. We had to convince project managers that if you’re more transparent with your workflows, you’ll reduce the anxiety levels and increase the trust level. Every sale from 2018 to the end of 2019 was very educational.

Then in 2020, G2 recognized our category. We’re still in the project management category, but they created a new category called client onboarding software. That was a big inflection point. It meant that we had competitors. From the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020, we had two or three competitors that were starting to advertise the same services as us, but we’re not seeing them in the market. Just their presence meant that a category could be created.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord
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