Chris Basham, COO at TrackVia, talked with us last week.
TrackVia allows non-technical business people to build their own software applications or databases to better and more easily organize and manage their day-to-day work via the cloud.
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How did TrackVia get started?
Matt McAdams and I cofounded the company. We both saw a lot of businesspeople using excel as a database and we saw those businesspeopole getting frustrated at its limitations. The reason people don’t use a real database is that it’s always been too hard. So, we decided to build a database for businesspeople that’s easy to use.
How has your product changed from that original vision to where you are today?
Our product vision has remained very steady. Our customers are very different from what we originally envisioned. We thought we’d have small team, and that the projects we did for companies would have a finite life span. We haven’t necessarily pivoted so much as been pulled upstratm by our customers.
Today they’re from large and global companies like Honda, and global brands like NorthFace, Lucy active wear, Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Instead of finite or one-time-use apps, they’re running what we call business-critical applications. Some of the apps we've built process more than $100m/year of orders for our customers. Some track inventory levels at car dealerships across the country. These are not trivial applications. Theyr’e really large-scale apps and some of them have thousands of users.
A couple of times moving up market like that almost killed us, but it didn’t, it’s made us better.
What do you mean?
We were, at the time, a small company – 6-8 people. Delivering the features that larger companies needed to build these more sophisticated apps was a real challenge for us to deliver. We had to work hard and grow quickly.
Now iur goal is to have every company in the world to have at least one TrackVia app. At those points we had one company that needed one thing, and it took all of our reseources to build what was needed for that one big customer before we could go back to focusing on a whole bunch of potential customers.
It’s not that we almost failed, but it was a few people working around the clock for a period of time to develop this one thig – delivering an app that was way beyond what we had envisioned, but we did it.
That sounds like a big turning point for you. What were some others?
One of the big turning points was unintended. In the fall of 2008 there was a recession and that caused all of the VC funds to tell their portfolo compnies not to expect to raise $$ any time soon. So we changed our pricing model from $10/month to a minimum of $250 a month. We wanted to focus our resources on bigger opportunities while we got throught the recession, but it led us to start connecting to those bigger companies and bigger opportunities – we started to look like business software not consumer software. The most recent has been closing a round of funding - $7.1m this past summer. We’ve raised money along the way, but it’s really the first time we’ce had a large chunk at one time to hire the team we need to to go execute on the opportunity.
How big is the company now?
About 38 people, and we're looking to grow this year. We intend to end 2013 with more than 50 employees. We'll be hiring a lot for developers and sales people.
With that in mind, how would you describe TrackVia to people who might be interested in applying?
It’s a work hard, play hard culture. You could grab anyone in the office today and they would tell you it’s a lot of fun to work here. It’s not a stressful culture. It is results-oriented, but it’s not zero tolerance for failure, either. As the person who’s been here the longest, I’m also the person who’s failed the most. If you’re failing productively, we’re all for that.
You also need to be self-motivated, we’re just not a big enough organization to nurture people along who need to be told every step of the way exactly what to do. People who work here have a pretty good amount of discretion about how to get things done. You have to be comfortable with being given a goal, but not necessarily exact steps on how to accomplish it.
Do you have any lessons you've learned along the way that you can share?
One mistake we made early on was doing what I would call true customizations for a handful of customers. A true customization is different from accelerating a feature that all can benefit from – you write specific code that doesn’t apply to all customers. What happens when you do that is later on, you tend to break that customer’s custom code by releasing updates. It’s a surprisingly big pentalty to pay for singning up that customer. You have to test your releases against individual customers’ accounts – not just against your one code base.
The other mistake we made was waiting too long to build out a project management team. We got away without it for a long time because Matt and I were really doing the hands-on sales support and development. We didn’t really need that extra layer, but as we’ve gotten bigger I think sthat some of our design has suffered because we didn’t have a project management team.
What other advice would you give to aspiring founders and new companies?
It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be worth it. Don’t plan on raising money and then starting your company. You need to do whatever you need to scrape together some bare minimum just to go produce a product that shows at least one metric growing quickly. It almost doesn’t matter what the metric is, it could be anything. But you’re not going to be able to raise money from investors just on your idea alone.
Are there any books, apps, resources, etc. that you'd recommend?
There's a book that's kind of a high tech bible, "Crossing the Chasm" by Jeffrey Moore. It’s a book that you need to read to understand tech adoption cycles.
There are a couple of VC blogs that are really helpful. Bessemer Venture Partners blogs frequently about cloud services, pricing models, how much money you need to raise, how to be effective at marketing.
Husbspot is a marketing blog that has fantastic content for marketing your product. I’m assuming that as a tech startup you’ve got people who know how to build a great product – the challenge is usually how you take that product to market.
Time for our favorite question. Why did you choose to start up in Denver?
It’s great place to build a company. It has a critical mass of resources – that means there are investors who can help fund your business. There are entrepreneurs who have done it before and are willing to share time with you and help you learn from their mistakes. There’s a supportive government which I think is surprisingly important. To successfully build a company, you need to have contacts on both coasts, in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston... local governments have a reputation as being startup-friendly or not. Denver has a great reputation. We've had investors on both costs. It’s one of the few places that Silicon Valley investors will take a board seat that they’re willing to travel for.
Finding money is often one of the biggest challenges for new companies. Do you have any insights for earlier-stage companies?
There are two ways to be great at raising money. The first is you have to have previously produced a big win for an investor. If you haven’t done that, it rolls over to the second way: having some metric that is growing rapidly. I think there’s a misconception that if you find the right person who knows VC’s that person is going to help you raise money, or that if you hire the right CEO that’s going to help you raise money. In my experience, even if you have a great story to tell, you will not be able to raise money unless you hve that one metric that is gong up and to the right.
The reason I keep saying "right metric" is that often they don’t invest based on the amount of money your company is making. They’re investing because of massive adoption by consumers. It might be the amount of money your company is making, but more likely it’s the number of visitors to your site, people signing up for a free trial, or the number of people who have signed up for a trial that have converted.
Learn more about TrackVia via their company profile, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter @travckvia.
This week we also visited AppIt Ventures and Prediculous. For a full recap of the Startup Tour and previous weeks' posts, go here.
