Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle (Part 6)

SM: Operating under a traditional software licensing model, are you seeing any recurring revenues?

CC: We do have support, but I also should point out that we are rolling out our online services such as online donations and email marketing. This year the non-profit side is profitable. We started working on SalesWorks after we experienced some failures in our hosted CRM. They were having outages, which was a problem for us. We lost an entire day of sales. In response I decided we were going to do this for small businesses.

It took a while for us to get it out because we only had three developers. We showed the beta at Demo eighteen months ago. We then put it to bed for a while as we reorganized the company and focused on the non-profit side of the house.

SM: How big is the donor management piece now?

CC: It is about $3 million. We are growing at 100% per year. We will slow down to 60% this year; we are seeing some contraction right now.

SM: Are you entirely self-funded or friends and family funded?

CC: No. I considered our Series A to be the wrap up from friends and family. I took additional money from a small boutique firm called Underdog Ventures. The total was about $2 million. I then just raised another $2 million from a new venture fund called TBL, which stands for Triple Bottom Line. It was founded by one of the co-founders of Costco and some other high net worth individuals. It is managed by Mark Finser.

Mark was the guy who built RSF Social Finance. It is a very interesting story: he got the endowment up to $120 million. They gave low interest loans to entrepreneurial companies that would have a social impact. They do their standard payout of 5%, but then they take a good chunk of their endowment and do private investments.

SM: Did you use the $2 million you raised from TBL to get into the small business market?

CC: Yes. We took that and I created a new division. Our tag line is ‘build your own economy’, which we started back in May before the real shakeup. It has taken on new meaning now as the context has changed. We started shipping CircleDog in August, and we have the pro version coming out. We are absolutely contrarian. We believe small businesses are largely at the desktop. We will be distributing through retail such as Staples and OfficeMax, because that is where small business owners shop. It is amazing.

SM: What is the functionality you are going to put on the desktop?

CC: It is a merger of the desktop and the web, primarily sitting on the desktop. It is contact and customer management. Standard features are bi-directional, real-time Outlook integration. When you add a contact to Outlook, it gets added to CircleDog. When you add a calendar event it gets updated in both calendars. We also use Outlook seamlessly as the way to send email. It is great for mail merge because you can do that in one click.

Ultimately this has been an effort to define my life. I have thought about what would be on my tombstone and I wanted to have something that could define my life’s work. There is economic and social justice, and I believe in software justice. That is what we are doing here. Designing software that small business owners can use immediately. They should not have to get a dummies book to use what they buy because they are not dummies.

SM: Thank you for sharing your story.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle
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