Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the timeline for when all this is happening? When did you start developing? When did you get it out there? When did you get this endorsement and this opportunity to be celebrated in front of all these universities? What is the timeline of when all this is happening?

Chris Sinkinson: It happened fairly quickly. It was 2011 when we started working on it.  We soft launched the first version of the app in the winter term. Higher ed institutions are very risk averse. They want to do things slowly, but they went loud. They did a full launch in the summer of 2012. It was in that fall when they won the award. By about a year after building the first prototype, we had that award under our belt.

Sramana Mitra: All this while, were you bootstrapping?

Chris Sinkinson: That’s right. I’d mentioned we had a bunch of other products. The way you build a wall is one brick at a time. We had a revenue that was like a wall of bricks. It was built up of all these little products that we had. As I mentioned, I had started ten years earlier, so I had some other revenue from that.

We were also still in student mode. We didn’t have any major financial commitments or anything like that. We could live very cheaply..

Sramana Mitra: So in the fall of 2012, once you’ve got this endorsement, what happens on the sales side?

Chris Sinkinson: We haven’t really done any marketing. We put up a website, but we haven’t reached out to anybody or done anything outbound. We started getting calls because they had seen the award. One of the bigger schools in Toronto reached out to us and it didn’t take very much convincing. We were able to charge higher prices.

You mentioned how everything is global now. Well, even back then, the University of Melbourne in Australia reached out to us because they had heard about this safety app and wanted us to develop one for them as well. So, we’d kind of started going with this.

What was really interesting is that clients were coming to us, but we realized that we had to build these apps for each individual campus, and they all wanted them customized and tailored and made the way that they felt it should work.

This leads to a scalability issue, right? That’s where it gets really scary. Our very first customer was like that as well. They had really pushed us on features. I can recall spending weekends writing code and then two weeks later deleting that code because they wanted it completely different.

So, early in the process, we said, “Okay, we must think like Henry Ford here for a moment.  We can’t just build cars. We need to build the assembly line for cars.” We can’t just build apps one at a time. We need to come up with like an assembly line for apps. One of the first things we did was build our own content management system into the app so that all the colors, branding, and functionality could be moved around and structured the way the client wants.

You can imagine back in 2012, that was pretty innovative. Nobody was thinking of doing that. That scared off a lot of competitors from doing things the way we were doing it. It just looked like too much work. How could they compete at that price with all that customization required? We never really had any competitor who did it exactly the way we did.

Our secret sauce was that we had built a factory with an assembly line to make these apps. We would do some basic setup. We used a template to start from, and that template had every single feature turned on in it. The clients would remove things that they didn’t want. And then after an onboarding with them over a zoom call, they would have a first version of their product that they could then start talking about and showing to their community. It was very effective, and we were able to do it cost effectively as well.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Canadian Brothers Bootstrapping to $40M Exit: Chris Sinkinson, Co-Founder AppArmor
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