From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money?

Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had popped up over the four years prior to my starting the business. We had a lot of traction with small business customers around the world. We also worked hard to make sure that they were having a good experience on the platform and encouraging them to leave reviews in the Microsoft marketplace or the Google marketplace and incentivize telling their friends.

As a freemium product, that helped us gain some early traction over some of the paid-only options in the market. I did feel that we needed to raise additional capital to help build the business considering the size of the total addressable market. We had a theory that every company in the world that has customers should use CRM.

It’s a very large addressable market. I always felt like we needed a lot of capital to win that market in the SMB place over the medium term. We raised an additional $10 million in the Series B round. Then we raised an additional $25 million just last year for our Series C.

Sramana Mitra: What was your run rate at the point at which you raised Series B?

Anthony Smith: We were around about $5 million. We had monetized quite a few of our free customers. We could see that it was trending. The customers would start off on free and then they would move to paid over a period of time. We had a very low customer acquisition cost because of the sign-ups that we were getting through the marketplaces. It was pretty attractive from a financial metrics point of view.

Sramana Mitra: What about Series C? How far have you gotten?

Anthony Smith: We had over a million customers split between free and paid. We had a pretty permanent position in the SMB CRM marketplace. We felt like we had a pretty good monetization model that we could demonstrate.

Sramana Mitra: What was the channel situation at this point? Had you introduced other channels?

Anthony Smith: After we raised our Series A, we did a little bit of work with Google Ads and a little bit of display advertising, but it was a very minimal spend. We still got the majority of the customers either through word-of-mouth or through referrals. Still a lot of customers found us organically or through one of those referral sites.

Sramana Mitra: What are the secrets of being successful in these channels? What can you share for our audience?

Anthony Smith: One of the things that we did really well was to make sure that we asked customers who were enjoying the product to leave a review in the marketplace. We made sure that the customers that we asked to do that had good engagement with the product. We got a lot of positive reviews. That helped us elevate our position in those marketplaces and make sure that those acquisition channels were still working very well for us.

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to share?

Anthony Smith: We’ve branched out quite a fair bit in terms of the number of channels that we gather customers from. At Insightly, we sign up around about 25,000 new businesses every 30 days. A lot of those businesses are still small businesses. Some of those are much larger businesses than we originally started off with.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been building out some of our feature sets that are for slightly bigger businesses. When we started Insightly, we were aiming at businesses that had less than 20 employees in size. We were finding that a lot of those customers were getting to the point where they were very popular businesses and they wanted some additional features that we didn’t have at that time.

We would spend all this effort to bring these customers on board and I didn’t really want them to outgrow the product. We started building out some features for larger companies. We obviously use our own software internally. Insightly has 150 employees today. We use our own employee base as a means to understand what some of the deficiencies were in the product as well as talking to customers. Today we’ve got Fortune 500 companies and we’re in more diverse industries than when we started.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly
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