SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1144 Why I sold my profitable, bootstrapped $5.5m ARR company
11 Sep 2018
Chapter 1: When did Cameron Avery launch his company Elastic Grid?
Launched his company about the year I was born. Just kidding. I'm not actually kidding by too many years, only about a decade. But launched his company in 2001, really as an agency, doing a lot of consulting, professional services related. Quickly changed that into kind of more relationship platform with Elastic Grid. Scaled that to about $5.5 million in annual revenue.
40 employees down in Sydney, across some of their other offices as well. And decided, you know what? There's a roll-up happening in this space. I want to be ahead of it. I'm going to sell this thing to Zipf. Now he's leading as an SVP. They're doing business development.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
Chapter 2: How did Cameron scale Elastic Grid to $5.5 million in ARR?
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Cameron Avery.
Chapter 3: What motivated Cameron to sell his company to Zift?
He created a company called Elastic Grid, which enhances the partner experience by delivering scalable, easy to use channel marketing platform for backend by personal support. He ended up selling that to Ziff Solutions, where he's now an SVP of business development. And now, again, started Elastic Grid and Sidney is now living here in the States in California.
Cameron, are you ready to take us to the top? I am indeed. Let's go for it. Give us the story here. So Elastic Grid, first off, let's work backwards. When did you sell the company? The company got acquired in November last year, just after Thanksgiving. Okay, so November 2017. And what year did you launch Elastic Grid in?
I launched a company called Elastic Digital back in 2001, so many moons ago, and it was a digital creative agency. So I started that in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Literally, we don't have basements in Bondi. How do you start a company right next to Bondi Beach? I would get nothing done. I'd be out on the beach all day. But it's changed a lot in 20 years, Nathan. I'll give you that.
But yeah, it was tough, mate. I used to go surfing at lunchtime, but we used to knuckle down in the sunroom and we banged out a program called Profile to Lead, which we linked up with email marketing. Listen, I'm showing my age. That was 20 years ago. So it was pretty new and sexy. But before that, I was...
The stories before that I was working in IT distribution and they were spending a ton of money, like millions of dollars doing boondoggles, golf days, sporting events, Olympics. And they were just spending money, ads in ARN, CRN. It's pretty IT specific. No ROI. It was just kind of like, show me the money. So what I said is like, there's got to be a better way.
And that's when I started interlinking. I taught myself at night, a program called Macromedia Flash 2. I realized that through actions- Macro, Jesus, Cameron. Macro media, holy cow. I think Apple shot that thing in the head. So listen, I taught myself that and I worked with a technical guy there called Alois Caselli and he was the no to my yes.
But anyway, that's how we created a company called Elastic Digital back then. The premise was that, look, stop just spending money. Why don't we actually use email, tell a good story, hence the Macromedia Flash, and then track it and then actually know if somebody is interested in a product. Listen, this is 20 years ago. It was cutting-edge stuff. So what did you scale it to?
So I imagine did you turn this into like a pure play SaaS model away from the agency or what was the model before you sold? I don't think SaaS was a word 20 years ago. That's why I asked. Exactly. So listen ā When we left, it was a pure creative. We wanted to be a digital creative agency. And then we created the backbone, that profile to lead tracking technology underneath it.
So we were selling creative content. But we had a back end, which we now call is a SaaS program, where we would start to track the interactions and let somebody know if there was a propensity to buy. So that was kind of what we created as Elastic Digital.
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