SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Collabogence Pivoting from $300k Agency, Raising $1.5m on $5m Pre?
20 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What inspired Peter Smit to start Collabogence?
First year was about 70,000. Okay.
Yep.
And probably in the hundreds last year. And right now, because we've done a major shift toward helping organizations with the workplace strategy, both the work from home and new office environments, we see that going up to probably a run rate of close to a million by the second half of this year.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Lookers CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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Chapter 2: How did Collabogence transition from consulting to a SaaS model?
Okay, so you can't have a six total team size and then six engineers and then one extra. That would be seven total. Seven total. Okay, seven total, including you? Yes, including me. Okay, so that means five of them are engineers and then you have this COO guy and then you. Correct. I see. Okay, and so give us more of the backstory here. What sort of got you into this space?
So what... After business school, which I did in the United States, I landed at Honeywell's European head office and then went to a Swiss company, which is now part of Siemens in Switzerland and in global roles because I speak a bunch of languages. I was launching products globally, global account management, these types of things.
And if I fast forward to five years ago with the inception of Collabagence was really the idea that I saw companies that were looking to do one of three things or all three at the same time. One was to change the culture and the way they work with each other. So they needed to have a better understanding of how they work with each other and they wanted to become more collaborative.
They were changing their workplace strategy and office utilization and shifting from the assigned desk environment to the activity-based workspace model. and also with the goal of becoming more productive and collaborative. And then they were busy implementing a lot of technology tools, which were also enablers to improve collaboration.
And my comment was that they were spending millions of dollars on each of these initiatives and had no ability to establish a baseline and no ability to measure any actual impact or change in the behavior. We don't profess to measure productivity. What we can show you is changes in effectiveness and productivity, which is a proxy for a change in productivity.
How can you not measure productivity, but be able to measure change in productivity? It feels like you have to have both.
It came out of the industrial revolution where they were looking at how many widgets can we produce? And in a knowledge-based environment, productivity is a very difficult thing to measure. And other than the financial results of a company overall. So really, if you want to
if you want to do it and we're having some early discussions with some clients that want to start looking at tying change in this measure to performance management.
So what does that mean though? This, this all, these all feel like big fancy sort of Harvard business review book sort of words to me versus practical, real things actually happening in dev shops and dev teams.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Peter face in the early stages of Collabogence?
So that would be in between five to seven.
And I mean, people are going to push you on that. You're basically pre-revenue right now. Why are you worth five to 7 million bucks?
Well, that's the assumption that the contracts that we would be signing would all be quarter of a million to $500,000 each.
Okay.
So what if you don't sign those contracts? How much runway do you have?
Continue bootstrapping.
Well, I assume you can't pay seven people full time on $200,000 of total annual revenue.
Correct.
So who's putting in the money when there's a gap? You?
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