Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 5)

Sramana: Your TAM is essentially tied to the number of transactions you can process. You really needed to get a handle on the volume of transactions going through your system. What did you define your TAM after this reality emerged?

Jake Weatherly: We look at all of our segments somewhat uniquely. We also look at the industries where exclusive offers are prevalent to inform that. College students have a buying power of $417 billion annually. In 2012 they spent 12.9 billion dollars in apparel which was up 126% from 2011, and 72% of students buy apparel online. We look at industries very specifically, especially when instant verification can be an improvement in the customer experience or it can create parity in the offers that are available for store based offers which require identification and the lack of corresponding offers online because of a lack of identity verification.

Sramana: What is the competition?

Jake Weatherly: The competition is internal processes today. Third-party service providers such as call centers and outsources are really where the competition lies. This has historically been looked at as a problem that can be solved with customer service. Some companies do that internally and others run online stores or position themselves as outsourcers with the ability to do verification.

Sramana: Where are you in terms of revenue?

Jake Weatherly: We are on track for $4.4 million this year.

Sramana: I know you are building this company in Eugene. Tell me a bit more about that? I actively support the globalization of entrepreneurship.

Jake Weatherly: We have 16 employees today, nine of whom are in Eugene. We decided to lease a commercial property, which is a 1908 craftsman home. That has allowed us to create our own culture and do a lot of social activities. In addition to our folks in Eugene, the head of business development is the former head of business development for Network Solutions and he is located in Virginia. The heart of big data is in the DC area. All of the federal big data is there. Without question our key data partnerships are there.

Sramana: What is the composition of the 16-person team in Eugene?

Jake Weatherly: We have two of our marketing people here and another person in Portland who oversees marketing. Our head of customer service is here and our sales team is here. Three co-founders –me, David Shear and Marci Hansen – are all here in Eugene. Our head of technology and the architect of our platform is in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We also have our head of project management here who oversees all of our client implementations. We do some implementations that are hosted by SheerID. It can be a hosted webpage or a form. We also support our clients with a deep integration using our API using all of our documentation. That allows our product managers to be focused on all different types of implementations.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId
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