Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 5)

Lori Steele Contorer: We began to focus on United States for serving overseas and military voters. We did that because the numbers were staggering. 70% of the time that people tried to vote from abroad, their votes weren’t counted. That’s not because governments don’t count the vote unless they have to. That’s a misperception. Governments always have to account all the ballots that come in as long as they come in on time. Because of the challenges of voting from abroad with the mail, that wasn’t happening.

We helped to get a law passed in 2009 that required every State in the US to offer digital ballots to their overseas voters. They could still choose to vote by mail if they wanted to but we were going to give them the ability to offer a secure digital ballot. That’s where the big change in the market began. I’m beginning to see that sort of change not just in United States but internationally.

Sramana Mitra: We have no idea what the size is of your company or how you’ve grown through the years. I need something to anchor the story in. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing that I disagree with in what you said in this particular comment. I think you actually grew perfectly reasonably from a SaaS business model point of view after you made the switch in about 2010. If you look at your company from 2010 to 2014, my assumption is you have a reasonable growth rate. I don’t think it’s a sub-par growth rate but until 2010, you were not operating on a SaaS model.

Eyal Magen: That’s also true.

Sramana Mitra: We’re doing story after story of SaaS companies that start as SaaS companies that are scaling phenomenally fast. If you look at Marketo, for instance, it’s a rapidly growing company. These companies started as SaaS. They had no illusions of being anything else. They wanted to be SaaS. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult.

Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and Norwest. They did the Series A round for Avere. They’re just incredible partners. We have John Jarve at Menlo and Matt Howard at Norwest.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2009?

Ron Bianchini: Yes, that was in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to ship the first product? >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you were executing this project, what was the business model for the company?

Lori Steele Contorer: The business model at that time was to sell election software and services, probably on a per election fee as opposed to a SaaS model. We would get hired to do an election and we would deliver the software and the services around that. It was usually done either remotely by PC or at a polling station.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size were these projects? The government of Australia was your client. What scale of a client was that?

Lori Steele Contorer: It was definitely mid-six figures. They were pilot projects for very specific voters. It wasn’t a large election for all voters and it wasn’t small private sector elections. It became clear to us though after that, that a SaaS model made a whole lot more of sense. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are other highlights in the journey of building Gigya that are major strategic points where you went to the next level? Of course, one of the big strategic moves was figuring out what problem you were going to solve and achieving that product-market fit. It sounds like you achieved that in the 2006 to 2007 time frame.

Eyal Magen: Originally, we provided the product for free. We were thinking that sites would integrate their systems and we would find advertising opportunities around the data. Switching from a free model to a SaaS pricing model was a big decision. There’s something to be said about that because once you find out the right model for your company, a lot of things in the organization become clear because you know the metrics that you need to watch. Everybody knows that for SaaS companies what’s important is new bookings and your renewal rate. It’s the same for every SaaS company. If you’re an advertising company, you have a different set of metrics. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 6)

Ron Bianchini: Because of the incredible offload ratio, we’re able to build a clustering flash-based product that gives you some incredible performance levels. You can put that in front of a disk-based product, ideally a clustering disk-based product, and build out a system that gets the performance of flash with the cost point of disk.

Sramana Mitra: Is that what you decided to do with Avere?

Ron Bianchini: The VCs always said, “We would rather invest in a strong team than invest in a strong technology because it’s the team that has to bring the technology to market.” We started out with exactly that plan. Let’s leverage flash. Let’s separate performance and capacity. >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, you quit your job. How did you get started? What was your next step?

Lori Steele Contorer: I started looking around the world for the best technology. I’ve seen many companies throw money at technologies in the early 2000s and I feel if you don’t understand the process you’re trying to fix or improve, then you’re going to fail.

I discovered a technology in Australia and acquired that company. It was a small company at that time but they have been doing online voting since 1996. They had done government elections in 2002 and 2003. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you price this?

Eyal Magen: It’s a SaaS-based model, so you have to pay every year. We usually sign multi-year deals. We price it based on a combination of elements of the product that you purchase and obviously, the number of users that you anticipate.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a volume-based pricing model?

Eyal Magen: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: To summarize what you do in terms of the value proposition, if a user is shopping online on the GAP site and wants to log into the GAP site with Facebook or Twitter, they’re essentially going through your system to get authenticated and logged in. >>>