[ibimage==24636==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
The Boulder-based Kapta team, with CEO Alex Raymond on right.
Enterprise software provider Kapta wants high-growth companies to accelerate their growth. What CEO doesn’t like the sound of that?
About 25 companies, all which CEO Alex Raymond describes as high-growth, are currently using Kapta to align the goals of their couple hundred employees; most recently, Acision messaging company signed on as a Kapta client alongside existing local clients such as Inspirato and TapInfluence. As Kapta continues to gain customers and traction, Raymond said the team is out to prove a point:
“You can build enterprise software companies in Colorado: Rally Software did it, Ping Identity is doing it,” Raymond said. “You don’t all have to be some social media/marketing type of company on the consumer side. Colorado can do B2B enterprise SaaS.”
Determined to make a name for Colorado, Kapta is approaching the enterprise market from a unique angle by letting CEOs take company growth into their own hands, solving a company culture problem that Raymond said is currently only being addressed by non-strategic HR teams and expensive consultants.
“What our tool does is it brings that culture of focusing on the ‘important’ to the company,” Raymond said. “When you do that, you get a sense of shared responsibility within the company, that we are all participating and we are all responsible for the growth and success of this business. So when you do that you get very strong alignment; the result is that you’re able to more, faster.”
Heading into 2014, Kapta is looking to get companies moving at an even faster pace by partnering up with a few consulting companies (which Raymond declined to name yet). Paired up with Kapta, consultants will be able to implement their complex strategies for the long-term.
“You guys do what your best at, we’ll do what we’re best at and the client gets a lot more value than each of us doing it on our own,” Raymond said. “One of things that we’ve learned is that you can either be a consulting company in this space or you can be a software company, but it’s really hard to be both.”
Honing in on exactly what value Kapta provides as a software company was a crucial step in Raymond’s journey as an entrepreneur. He said the team came to a few important realizations in the middle of last year like who Kapta’s customers are (CEOs), what they care about (growth) and how much they will pay (Kapta decided to up its prices and forgo a low-price subscription model). All these adaptations stemmed from the four-person team’s conversations with actual customers; Raymond said they have done over 1,000 interviews so far.
“You get incremental value from every conversation,” Raymond said. “The best ones by far are the ones who tell you, ‘You’re a total idiot’ because then you actually understand what it looks like from the other person’s perspective.”
Listening to customers, and then providing what they need, is what defines a company, Raymond said; and because Raymond has bootstrapped the entire business since founding it in 2011, he only is obligated to listen to customers’ feedback, not investors’.
“Why I started Kapta was to make a business and until you have actual customers giving you their money for what you built, you don’t have a business: you have a hobby,” Raymond said. “We’ve managed to prove that we can do it that way, that if you listen to customers and you build the things that they need then you can actually create a business. We’re not big believers in doing it in any other way.”
