SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
999 He Bet Big on Salesforce, Now His CMS Does $7.5m
19 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Doug Girvin's journey with Stantive Technologies?
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 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. 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.
Chapter 2: How did OrchestraCMS leverage Salesforce for its growth?
Hello, everybody. My guest today is Douglas Girvin. He's the CEO and founder of Stantive Technologies Group, whose flagship product, Orchestra CMS, is the first and only known enterprise class content management platform built 100% natively on the Salesforce platform. Doug, are you ready to take us to the top? I am, absolutely. So that can be a blessing and a curse going all in on one platform.
Why'd you decide to take that route? A couple of reasons. One, when we built the product back in 2010, we really saw the emergence of this idea of personalization. Amazon had taught us about that in 2005, 6, 7, 8.
Chapter 3: What challenges did AstraZeneca face that OrchestraCMS helped solve?
We really saw this personalization thing happening in a big way on more of a B2B side. So the only way to really personalize a user's experience is to have access to all that information about that user so you can tailor the experience they're getting on the web at the time. That was number one.
Number two, Salesforce, we really felt was an emerging powerhouse coming into the enterprise computing space. We saw this about seven or eight years ago and really felt that it was the next generation enterprise computing platform. So combining those two along with a really unique way to build applications natively within the platform, we thought was a real trifecta in terms of
the next generation IT service delivery. And give me an example of a customer that's using you guys and tell me what they launched with you plus Salesforce. Sure, absolutely. A great example would be AstraZeneca, big global pharmaceutical company.
Chapter 4: What is the business model of OrchestraCMS and how does it generate revenue?
So they are dealing with 10 different languages, 40 countries, 65,000 employees, 20,000 contractors. Big challenges, how do you unify all the communications collaboration across all those employees around the world? They, like many companies, had many disparate systems internally that were doing that.
What they were able to do with Orchestra CMS was consolidate all of that information and all the collaboration into a single platform on Orchestra CMS sitting on Salesforce. So the platform not only delivers content and facilitates collaboration, but the other thing it does is it brings together all the IT applications in that organization that employees need to get their work done.
So what happens is the employees end up with a single place to go to do all of their work. It's a very pleasing environment from a usability perspective. It deals with all the linguistic issues across geographies, all the compliance issues across geographies and pharma, and all of that from a single platform with a highly distributed group of hundreds of authors around the world.
And is the model a SaaS model or pay-as-you-go, or what's the model? It's all SaaS.
Chapter 5: How has Stantive Technologies scaled its customer base over the years?
It's all SaaS, great. So it's all subscription. Yeah, absolutely. And Orchestra delivers both that internet type of capability as well as the traditional portal as well as public sites. So if you take a look at most organizations today, they're dealing with... you know, something different on their public site, something different for their portal.
If they're doing say banking, online banking, that's a different technology. If they're looking inward to their employees, that's yet a different technology. So we unify all of that. And then we surface all that functionality out of Salesforce or other platforms in a business driven, highly compliant way.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Doug Girvin use to retain customers and reduce churn?
And Doug, what's the average customer paying you per year? Would you say? Um, it really varies widely, but if you sort of stuck it in the middle somewhere, you know, between 150 and a half million dollars a year. Okay, good. So yeah, you're very, you're very much in the enterprise space. Absolutely. Got it.
So it's fair to say it'd be 150 as a minimum, 500 as an average, and you probably have some outliers that are way above that. Yeah. Okay.
Chapter 7: What are the future growth plans for Stantive Technologies?
Give me more of the backstory here. When did you launch the company? So the company has been around for a while. We, so we were, our first incarnation was as a partner with Sun Microsystems. So we were very heavily into large systems and software. early 90s. So I've been around for a while, hence the gray hair.
The product itself, we got on Salesforce as a customer in 2003 when they were very young. Felt there was a real potential future there. Built a lot of the things that we did in our business around that at the time.
Chapter 8: What lessons did Doug Girvin learn from his entrepreneurial journey?
And really started making the transition into Salesforce development about 10 years ago when that became available. So we've been on the platform developing for as long as you could be. Yeah, so you launched in 1991. You scaled to where you are obviously today. Have you bootstrapped this or have you raised? So we've had two incarnations.
The first number of years was really around the Sun Microsystems partnership. The product itself was built in 2009 and launched in 2010. We spun completely away from that partnership and went completely into Orchestra CMS at that point. So think of us as really seven years old in that respect. We bootstrapped for about half the time and raised some capital for the second half.
And how much total have you raised so far? Somewhere around 15 million. 15. And why decide to go that route versus continuing to bootstrap? Part of the challenge we had was that when we launched Orchestra, we figured we'd evolve like everybody else. You sort of move up the food chain as the product gets more sophisticated.
Within six months of launching the product, we were into Fortune 100 companies. They really love the idea of that highly personalized experience on Salesforce. A lot of them got the vision early. It really culminated with us winning a very, very large project with, let's say, a Fortune 5 company. And what's large? Are we talking multi-million dollar kind of deal or what? Yeah, that sort of area.
And that was really at the end of what we felt we could do with bootstrapping because the challenges to build to that level of scale and sophistication were too high. So we had to raise capital and really build up the engineering capability at the time. And over the past 10 years, what have you grown your customer base to?
It's somewhere north of about 50 large enterprise customers, mostly in the Fortune 500, Fortune 600 space. Got it. Can we put a cap on that? Can we say between maybe 50 and 75? Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. That's fair. That's good. And how are you landing these customers? What's your team size today and how many of them are dedicated to sales?
So we probably got about eight or nine dedicated to sales, either from a technology, you know, sales engineering, marketing, or pure selling perspective. Those deals come from a variety of sources. Some of them come directly to us through the web and other means, social, et cetera. Some of the opportunities come to us with our partnership with Salesforce.
And others are coming to us from referrals through systems integration partners. And what's your total team size? Total team size today is about 50. 50. Okay, good. So, I mean, well over 10% of your force. So, eight people focused really on the sales aspect. Absolutely. And that's increasing as we go forward. Yeah, that's good.
In terms of unit economics, I imagine you know there's one or two things you've got to get a brand new customer to do to make sure they stick. What is that for you? And what does your retention look like once people hit that, whatever that usage thing is? So what happens is we typically go in and very sophisticated implementations that are sticky by nature.
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