From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users?

Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had set a benchmark offering of $4.95 per user per month for an incredible amount of value. We felt we couldn’t go too much above that. We started off around about $12.95 per user per month.

When we started offering that to customers, we offered a higher level of support but not necessarily more features. At that point in time, it was still myself and two other developers who were building that product. We were mostly fixing bugs and listening to an incredible number of our customers. We decided that we could offer a higher level of support for paid customers. Quite a few customers had been using Insightly for a good six or seven months at that point in time.

They were using it to run their businesses. They felt like they would like to pay us money rather than run their businesses on a piece of free software. We had quite a few of those customers convert over to a paid plan even though a lot of additional value that we offered was not available on the paid plan.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit a million dollar run rate?

Anthony Smith: We almost reached that in the first year. I think we ended up at about $900,000. In year two, we managed to break through the million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was happening through Google app marketplace?

Anthony Smith: That’s right. For the first two and a quarter years of the business, you actually needed to be a Google apps user before you could become an Insightly user. We used their username and password permission system. It was very tightly coupled to that productivity suite.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. That’s really great. When you have a channel like that that is producing, it’s invaluable. It’s incredibly capital-efficient to build businesses when you have a channel producing like that. What were the next channels?

Anthony Smith: We integrated with almost all of the Google app’s properties. We started off with Gmail but then we integrated with calendaring system and Google Docs system. We were starting to hear some feedback from potential customers who were using the rival office suite which was Microsoft’s Office 365. That was getting a lot of traction. We thought we might be able to have a similar position within their office suite.

We integrated into a similar connection to Office 365 within the first couple of years that it was around. We got an awful lot of customers using that suite. In 2017, we are still the number one CRM solution for Google apps and we’re the number one CRM solution for small businesses by Office 365 as well. The connection between customer relationship management and those office suites for small business was very strong. That has helped us build the company.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly
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