Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 1)

Among the biases of the Venture Capital industry that need to be categorically ignored, Bootstrapping Using Services happens to be on the top of the list. Read on for yet another fantastic textbook case study.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 5)

Nick Mehta: The business went from an unattractive investment from a financial investor’s point of view to a highly attractive one. We are one of those companies that has a lot of long-term potential because we are the main player in the space. I never like to say that we own the category, but so far, we have been the leader.

Vista came to us. They are traditionally a private equity firm but they have become more of a growth equity firm. They went from investing in businesses that were about costs to investing in a high-growth business. They approached us many times over the years. A lot of their portfolio companies use Gainsight. They have this first-hand knowledge of Gainsight.

Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics and talk a bit about your financing strategy. I know that you did something recently. Talk me through the whole financial strategy. 

Nick Mehta: That is a big part of our success too. It’s expensive to create a category. You have to do these events and hire people. The scales don’t come right away. Overall, we raised $150 million. In modern days, it’s not a lot of money anymore. In the early days, that was a lot of money. We raised our first round amounting to $6 million from Battery Ventures. They believed in us.

Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to discuss?

Nick Mehta: A second thing is bringing our culture and values, which I think is a bit novel. We feel passionate about that. We brought that into our community. Many of these customer success people feel like they are a part of Gainsight. I was talking to one of our customers and she said, “I basically feel like I am an extended part of Gainsight.”

Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of strategic elements, what were some of the things that you did as you were growing that infused momentum into your journey?

Nick Mehta: Momentum is an important point. One thing that we did was this annual conference. We would invite people in the customer success field that included CEOs. With in-person events, you look around and see other people doing this thing too, and it makes you more confident that you should do it. It is natural human behavior.

Building a Unicorn and Establishing the Customer Success Category: Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight (Part 1)

I spoke with Nick back when Gainsight was very young. Much has happened since. This conversation catches us up on the interim years since 2013.

Gainsight recently raised money from Vista Equity at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 7)

Ben Hodson: What we realized is that customers coming to us were for customization and choice. Because we’d built the software to be so customizable with all these integrations, we now had a full product solution that we could start scaling. We saw tremendous growth in 2018. We did over 100% in our growth. In 2019, we were just skyrocketing.

In June, we hit a wall and had three months of negative growth. That was scary because it had never happened. We had become profitable back in 2015 and we were running the company at a good clip without outside investment. It was scary to have negative growth numbers. We didn’t know what was going on.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 6)

Ben Hodson: By the end of 2013, we were in a position where these guys would say, “Hey, we would pay for this. This is better than a lot of stuff out in the market.” We decided to take the money that we earned on our latest project RepeatSys. We had about $50,000 each. We were going to put it in JobNimbus to feed it with our own money and then sell off RepeatSys, which we basically sold at cost.