Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you didn’t need to use the Twilio API or anything. It was getting the data straight directly off the smartphone.

Chris Sinkinson: Yes. The smartphone geolocation data has latitude and longitude that we would send to a web-based dashboard. The campus security team had a map that showed a pin of where the call was coming from. While you were on the call, it would update that location. So if you were moving, that pin would move and then they were able to relay that to their response team.

Sramana Mitra: So you had a piece of the software on the app. And then you had a console that was the driver in the campus security office.

Chris Sinkinson: Exactly. We use the term map dashboard that the campus security people were looking at. So, the initial version of the product was very simple. It was just trying to accomplish that one thing.

I mentioned earlier that it was part of a campus safety working committee and they were looking at all aspects of safety. So as you can imagine with software, the feature list grew rapidly. They came up with all sorts of other ideas of things that we could do with the mobile app. So, we ended up building out a lot of those features, and it was very well received.

The way they marketed it was interesting. The students would come on campus and the campus security chief would normally get up in front of the incoming students and tell them to note their security number. Instead, he was just asking them to download this app. The app was actually white labeled for every institution that we sold it to. The school we went to was called Queens University. Everything at Queens has a Q in it. So, they decided to call the app Secure, but spelled it Sequre with a Q.

The institution actually won a national award for the app that we had built them. Unfortunately, our company didn’t get the award. The institution that was using the app got the award, but we still used it as part of our marketing. We would tell people it was an award winning app, which actually was incredibly successful.

The best part was that there was an award ceremony and it was attended by all the universities in the country. They actually showed a quick video of the app and then the representatives from the institution went up and got the award. This was the greatest marketing we had ever had because then they started getting asked who built that for you, and off it went from there.

Sramana Mitra: Did you get paid for the first one for the Queens university?

Chris Sinkinson: We did. I can’t believe how little we charged.

Sramana Mitra: What was the model?

Chris Sinkinson: We charged them a small upfront fee. I think it might’ve been as low as $1,000. We charged the institution $80 a month ongoing. The institution obviously gave the app away for free to all their students.

We definitely didn’t have a good sense on pricing. We were just so excited to have a client to be doing this with us, and we saw tons of potential. We swore them to secrecy after we realized how little we had charged them, and they agreed cause they knew they were getting a good deal, but it was great because we got to incubate that idea with them. We got to work with them directly.

Sramana Mitra: You got specs for the product and developed the product, got it out there, got an endorsement, and got a reference customer. That’s invaluable.

Chris Sinkinson: Exactly, I got to sit in the dispatch room at the institution, talk with the dispatchers, understand their issues, and how they wanted it built. It was invaluable. We should have paid them. Don’t tell my brother Dave that I said that. He hates that kind of stuff, but he’s on the Sales and Marketing side. Obviously, I’m on the technology side. I get pretty excited when people use our products and really like them.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor
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