Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Coalition Technologies Co-Founder Jordan Brannon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level did you close 2012 at?

Jordan Brannon: We finished 2012 at $1.5 million at about $125,000 per month. 

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2013?

Jordan Brannon: 2013 was another growth year for us. We finished the calendar year just under $2 million. We had about 30% growth that calendar year. The product solution was incrementing close to 20% of our revenue.

We basically grew the product at a similar level as the service. It was pretty much an add-on or component of the service we were offering.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next product introduced into the portfolio?

Jordan Brannon: It was our recruiting software. It was something we developed internally. This is prior to us going primarily remote. Because we were primarily a service business, we were running into the problem of a lack of qualified talent available within our budget.

We needed to scale our recruiting initiatives at a faster pace than what our small team could support. We developed a solution that allowed us to tie into the APIs for a number of larger recruiter and job-seeking platforms. We developed an online-based skills test. At that time, we were averaging about 2,000 applicants per month.

Sramana Mitra: That was launched when?

Jordan Brannon: 2013.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you reach in 2013? What was the split between the services business, the Twilio product, and the recruiting product?

Jordan Brannon: We finished 2013 at $1.8 million, 78% was services and 22% was SaaS solutions. About 20% was specifically tied to the call solution product and 2% was tied to the new recruiting solution.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2014?

Jordan Brannon: We continue to grow. We finished the year at about $2.4 million. During the course of that year, we were fairly flat and actually declined a little bit on the call solution. We made that as a standalone product but weren’t marketing it aggressively outside of our service layer.

There were a couple of other competitors who had entered the market in 2013 and 2014 who were more significantly investing into solutions that were competitive to ours. We were starting to see merchants coming to us with those solutions in place. We stepped further away from that.

Sramana Mitra: How did the recruitment product do?

Jordan Brannon: It grew fairly well. That grew from 2% of our revenue to about 5%. At that point, we’re still mainly looking at it as a value add.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of 2015 and 2016? What are major points that you want to discuss?

Jordan Brannon: We started to see acceleration in our service business through 2016 and even today as e-commerce took off. That allowed the service side of things to accelerate at a faster pace than our other SaaS solutions.

For us, they were an integral backbone to our success as a service business. From an actual revenue standpoint, it tended to be tight and lockstepped to our core service business. We did discontinue the call tracking solution in 2016. Today, we use CallRail as the primary solution for our merchants who are looking for a call tracking solution.

In 2016, we launched our standalone LMS. That was mainly looking at solving the challenges that we faced as a service business. That was the next big product launch.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Coalition Technologies Co-Founder Jordan Brannon
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