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Apptio Overview
Corp Profile
Funding
§ Founded in 2007 § 330+ Employees
§ Sea1le HQ § Founder of TBM Council
§ $90M+ in Equity Funding
§ Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Madrona, T. Rowe Price, Shasta, Cisco
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Apptio: The Strategic Business System for IT
FINANCE BUSINESS
UNDERSTAND OPTIONS, COSTS & VALUE
MANAGE SUPPLY AND DEMAND TO ACCELERATE INNOVATION
MAKE COSTS UNDERSTANDABLE TO
DRIVE ACCOUNTABILITY
IT
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About Me
I’m just a technologist -
Not an expert in sales, fund-raising, etc.
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About Me
I’m just a technologist -
Not an expert in sales, fund-raising, etc. Apptio’s growth is amazing, but…
Maybe I just got (very) lucky.
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Agenda
• How we got started
• What went well
• Lessons Learned (i.e., what didn’t go well)
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How we got started
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Target Market Discovery / Selection
Looking for: • A Large “Enough” Market • Customer Pain • Value-Add & Barriers to entry
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Product/Market Fit
Two type of startups A hint at the pain/solution: “Cost & Utilization” • 40+ customer meetings (large & small) • 15+ really boring books (from 80’s & 90’s) Not enough to ‘dictate’ a product
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Initial Traction
Q: How conceive/build MVP?
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Initial Traction
Q: How conceive/build MVP? A: Don’t. 1. Build a “plaRorm”. 2. Customize (even during sales cycle) 3. Get the deal 4. “Somehow” make customer successful 5. ? Repeat ?
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How’d that go?
• Was Expensive (Investment $), but we did get
trac^on
• Lots of work
• Did build stuff we didn’t need
• 2+ years before inkling of a “common” applica^on
• Some customers dug themselves a hole
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What Went Well
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Things That Went Well
SaaS • Motivates business for successful customers • Better Engineering / Customer interaction than traditional enterprise software • Can cover not-yet-built software with services • Data / Benchmarking
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Things That Went Well
Technology Selection • Early bet on GWT (HTML v.s Flash, Silverlight) • Otherwise tried & true tech foundation - we have enough of our own risk!
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Things That Went Well
Emergent Product Vision • Early on, no such thing as a bad deal/customer • No “big bets”. Didn’t guess. Customer $ committed before beta. • Incremental / on-the-fly build worked – about 90% successful. Did build some unnecessary
features, but we learnt and got $ & traction for it.
Invention of Barriers To Entry • Inference, Slowly-Changing Schema, Undo/Redo
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Lessons Learned
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Lessons Learned
Often high-pressure customer commits or operational challenges
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Lessons Learned
Early on, under-invested in functional leadership
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Lessons Learned
Was more difficult to “scale up” the startup team
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Lessons Learned
Be wary of late adoption customers during early phase
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Lessons Learned
Easier to plant the Acorn in a different spot (grow where built)
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Q&A
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