Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 7)

Alex Fuller: External investment has allowed us to increase our Sales & Marketing investment to reach more companies. Our R&D investment has allowed us to create more vertical specific features that further differentiate us from the competition. We have also established a US presence with people on the ground in a number of locations headquartered in New York. We have a very good win rate versus the competition and as such our communication strategy is to raise awareness to a wider audience with relevant messaging for their industry segment. For example, it could be it a Hosting Provider or a Magazine Publisher. We then ensure their journey to become a customer is expedited by dealing with people that not only know CloudSense but also their industry and can help provide leadership in achieving their goals. We have a vertical sales team with specific geographic coverage and marketing campaigns that addresses those companies that we know need our help and that we can help today.

Sramana: It sounds like you really focused on growth, particularly the sales side of the business, with the funds that you raised.

Alex Fuller: It really was about developing our ability to sell. We wanted to create sales of product licenses. The services will follow the product license sales. We also have strategic partnerships that we did not have before. This allows us to cover geographies that our services can’t reach and develop license sales in those geographies.

We have increased headcount in our R&D offices in Croatia. We have also built a marketing team in the UK and really built that team out so that we could do brand marketing. We were never able to present ourselves like that in the past. Our structure around marketing events and the way we present ourselves has dramatically changed.

Sramana: Where do you see the company going from here?

Alex Fuller: We are continuing to focus on our vertical product propositions. That is a very strategic element for us. We will be offering product solutions into other verticals as we move forward. The other aspect that is worth looking at is what we have done around the mobile space. We have the ability to deploy the intelligent rule sets and data we need into mobile devices. That allows you to run the same capabilities such as auto capture, validation, and pricing wherever you are. You can take the phone offline, talk to a customer, and then come back to the cloud later. That is a key point. The expansion into mobile functionality allows you to operate your business from mobile devices anywhere, even when not connected.

Sramana: Do you have a lot of mobile innovation on your product roadmap?

Alex Fuller: We have a group of core products but everything we do should be available on the mobile device as well.

Sramana: Thank you for your time and for sharing your story. Congratulations on your success to-date.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense
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