From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of marketing and customer acquisition, was Google search still yielding for you?

Jordan Boesch: Yes. If you searched for something as basic as restaurant scheduling software, there’d be no organic relevant results. We thought this was a great opportunity to build content around these keywords. We didn’t have a ton of money to spend on Adwords. We were very careful about that.

What we did do is we built a lot of content around restaurant scheduling software. That was so important for us to establish ourselves as the number one ranking organic result, which I still think exists today.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage was coming from that pure Google search around your content?

Jordan Boesch: I don’t remember exactly. Probably almost all of it.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very good place to be. How did the revenue ramp up in 2015?

Jordan Boesch: We were growing at a decent clip. In 2013, we were $40,000 in ARR. In 2016, we were a million dollars. We went from $40,000 to a couple hundred, to $500,000 to a million. At that point when we had a million in ARR, we closed a million-dollar seed round with our first institutional investor.

Sramana Mitra: This is in 2016?

Jordan Boesch: Yes, exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you raise money?

Jordan Boesch: This VC straddles both Canada and Bay Area. I was meeting with their partner who’s in Toronto. I was flying to Toronto many times a month to update them and pitch. I still like that part of it. A lot of people don’t like pitching to investors. I love telling that story. What was great is behind that story was a lot of real tangible revenue growth as well.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. So $1 million in revenue and a million in financing. What happens next?

Jordan Boesch: We hired more software developers. We hired a designer. We hired our first person that had kids in the family. You’re now on the hook for someone’s family. We hired the team, built the product, and then raised $3.5 million a couple of years later. We kept building the team.

When we were raising $3.5 million, it was around that time when a lot of founders go through this uncertainty. If you don’t raise, what happens to the business? Am I doing the right things? Am I right for the role? We aligned with some investors and closed. Our confidence rejuvenated and went back at it. We’re working with some larger customers.

Sramana Mitra: These larger customers were finding you?

Jordan Boesch: A lot of them were. A lot of them we weren’t ready for yet. One of the mistakes is, instead of saying we’re not ready, we could have built stuff for them. If I could go back, being true to your core audience is so important. A lot of founders think that there’s something way out there that they’re not seeing that is this magical growth lever.

I think it’s been shown to me that, more often than not, it’s right in front of you. It’s just more of what you’re doing. It’s doing it better. It’s one foot after the other. You got to crawl. You got to walk. You got to run. You think there’s something else you’re missing and it’s out there. You take your eye off the engine you’ve built that’s producing. Now that core foundation starts to diminish because it’s losing your attention. Focusing on that and augmenting that is really important.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts
1 2 3 4 5