Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the business was starting to become more of an enterprise business from there on.

Steve Liu: Very much so, yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did it scale? 2008 was when you made the transition to the new CEO. Between 2008 and 2014, what are the milestones and scaling strategies that you deployed?

Steve Liu: I think the big things that happened during that time were that we shored-up the product where the product just can’t meet expectations, and we put money and resources in making the product rock solid. Then, it was just building up and hiring. These days, we’re about 160 employees.

Sramana Mitra: All in Atlanta?

Steve Liu: A majority in Atlanta. I think maybe a handful people throughout the country. It was building people and departments, and building processes.

Sramana Mitra: How do you sell? What is your sales strategy?

Steve Liu: In healthcare, it’s a very long cycle. We’re blessed in that ours are fairly shorter. We used to completely build our business off of word of mouth in the first few years. It was all word of mouth. Marketing was very minimal. It was probably a little before Hart came in when we started going for marketing. We go in with demos and oftentimes if it’s a real big enterprise deal, myself and C-suite will jump in and be part of the sales cycle. It’s a very sales-driven company. Everybody in the company is a sales man in a way.

Sramana Mitra: What is the process in terms of selling? Is it a telesales process?

Steve Liu: Some are. It used to be all of them. We used to be completely WebEx sales. We actually ended up building a company that sold completely remotely over the phone. As you go enterprise, you have to have face-to-face meetings. Now, it’s completely changed.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the reason you have everybody in Atlanta is because you’re running all the telesales operations in Atlanta as well.

Steve Liu: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Then you have a few field sales rep who deal with some strategic accounts.

Steve Liu: Yes. We do have a Nashville office with two or three people. We also have a San Diego office as well. There are two people out here with me. We’ll probably begin to make that a little bit more standard.

Sramana Mitra: Your pricing has, I imagine, changed to Software-as-a-Service at this point?

Steve Liu: Exactly. Way back, we got rid of the the perpetual license and made it a Software-as-a-Service model. It’s a very high annual recurring revenue. After 12 years, we still have 95% renewal rates. Obviously, the price of the product has gone up.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now?

Steve Liu: We’ll do over $20 million by the end of this year.

Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve only invested $8 million into the company?

Steve Liu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Very efficient maneuvering.

Steve Liu: Not by purpose. Maybe, I’m just cheap. People ask me, “Is there anything you’d do differently?” I always do wonder, “What if I unstrapped the belt a little bit?” With a little more funding, we could have gone a little faster perhaps.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you compete with?

Steve Liu: We have two competitors that are out there. What’s really interesting is, both of them have been heavily funded. One had more than $100 million funding and the other around $50 million. I remember way back when I was first researching the market and seeing these guys and going, “Wow! I can’t beat them, but I’m just going to build a good product.” Nowadays, we land all the deals. We really dominate our space. I think we won nearly almost all the national enterprise bids over the past five years—30 of the past 33 bids have gone to us. We have majority of the largest healthcare systems in the US—13 of the top 20.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu
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