Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve raised about $22 million. Let’s talk about other strategic moves during the past four years that you’ve been a venture-funded company.

Robert Moore: One thing that we did quite recently that I think was very strategic in nature was we decided to release a second product. For most SaaS companies, your brand is also the brand of your product. It’s all nice, clean, and simple. If you’re using Zendesk, you’re using Zendesk. There are some companies out there in the SaaS universe who end up releasing multiple products for various reasons. For us, we saw a trend happening in the market where we noticed that a lot of our customers had a desire for much more control over how their data was stored, where it was stored, and what tools  they use to analyze it in addition to RJMetrics.

We started noticing that our dream of being the be-all, end-all solution was a bit out of sync with what the market wanted, which was for tools like ours to participate in an ecosystem of open data where you can go and use the best tool for the job at any given moment. Our CloudBI product is the best tool for the job for a lot of people in a lot of situations. We had a very specific vision reorientation last year to say that we want to make sure that we are actively participating in a more open data ecosystem. That means we can play nicely with other tools.

Our first move in that direction was to release our new product RJMetrics Pipeline. Pipeline is basically the back-end infrastructure of our traditional product. You get all the benefits of consolidating the data and moving it in from all these disparate sources, but then instead of going into the RJMetrics data warehouse, it just goes into your data warehouse. You can do whatever you want with that. You can put RJMetrics’ traditional product on top. You can put Tableau on top. You can just write a query. You can write your own scripts. It gives a lot of power to the analysts and engineers who has the desire to have more control.

Pipeline and our traditional product becomes this one-two punch where the traditional product is great for marketers and tacticians and people who don’t have the technical skills but want to get value out of their data. Pipeline is the tool for analysts and data scientists who want to go a little bit deeper.

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue split between the two products right now?

Robert Moore: Right now, CloudBi is basically 100%.

Sramana Mitra: Oh, so this is really new.

Robert Moore: Pipeline hit the market about three months ago. It’s growing more than 10 times faster than our original product grew when we first introduced it. It’s on a really promising trajectory, but the original product has such a large revenue that it still dwarfs it on a percentage basis.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore
1 2 3 4 5 6 7