Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to raise this $2.4 million, you had customers?

Joshua March: Yes, we had customers. It was still early on. We then sold the agency. In early 2012, we succeeded in selling the agency to a larger agency.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you get for the agency?

Joshua March: We don’t release the actual amount. It was a good number for us at that time. It wasn’t a billion dollar acquisition, but it was a great deal.

Sramana Mitra: I want to touch on the highlights of the Conversocial evolution. In 2011, you had product–market fit. You had $2.4 million in financing. What else happened in 2011 that is a highlight?

Joshua March: It was in 2012 that we re-launched. That’s when we really started growing. If you look at our revenue, it looks like a hockey stick kicks off from the beginning of 2012, which was exciting. At that time, my focus really became coming to the US. I always knew that if we wanted to be the leading company globally, we would have to be a US company. I initially started spending half of my time in the US from 2012. We opened in New York. I eventually moved here full-time. It’s been a very interesting few years. We’ve learned a lot. Even in 2012, the market was still very early. Most of the deals were still pretty small. The vast majority of companies are still viewing social media as a marketing channel. We really had to fight hard to educate the market of the need to move social into the contact center. It’s really only been over the last year that that became mainstream. A year ago, we started to gets RFPs to social customer service software. Before 2014, we never received an RFP. We were going out there and educating the market. We saw the market come to fruition. Our sales are in the hundreds of millions and there are some in the millions. Our biggest customer has got hundreds of agents doing social customer service.

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are mainly B2C brands?

Joshua March: Yes, large B2C brands and brands that have large customer service requirements.

Sramana Mitra: What about the competition? Are there other players that you’re seeing in deals? For hundred thousand dollars or two million dollar deals to be done, I imagine that competition has cropped up in the market.

Joshua March: In the last couple of years, there have been a couple of startups coming into the game. It has been really interesting for us to move from being the only people banging the drum. We’ve also seen some intense competition coming from other parts of the market. We have the social marketing vendors trying to claim that they can do everything social. They’re selling to the CMO and saying, “You don’t need a separate tool to do customer service.” That’s one of the battles that we fight. Most people now seem to realize that marketing platform can’t do large scale customer service. Your basic social engagement is never going to meet the needs of a contact center environment. The focus has gone more and more into customer service. We’ve seen more and more competition from the incumbent vendors – RightNow and the Oracles.

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Beyond the $2.4 million, have you raised more money?

Joshua March: Yes, we’ve raised a little bit over $11 million so far.

Sramana Mitra: That’s been from London or US VCs?

Joshua March: It’s a mix. It’s primarily been venture capital with some large angels. We have a few VCs from London and one VC from the Valley. We have some major angels in the US as well.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you operating out of now?

Joshua March: Our commercial HQ is in New York. We still have an office in UK. We started hiring on the West Coast as well.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of growth have you experienced from a company building point of view?

Joshua March: We’re now about just over 60 people.

Sramana Mitra: What about revenue growth?

Joshua March: We’ve essentially been doubling year on year. With the growing of the team, there have been lots of lessons. The biggest lesson for me, especially over the last two years, has been the importance of building a great senior management team. That was something that took me a while to learn. I was a young entrepreneur who was arrogant in believing I could just do everything. I learned the value of experience over the couple of years. When you have people who are experienced and have done it before, that can just accelerate the business so much. Over the last few years, we’ve built an amazing leadership team.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March
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