How I Gave Up My Job at Google to Start My Own SaaS Company
Lessons learned from building my own business.
7 years ago, I quit my job at Google to found my own SaaS company. I started building Badger Maps, a SaaS company for field salespeople. For the first months (or years), I was working without paying myself any salary. Today, we are making $3.6 million a year and have 60 employees spread across offices in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Spain, India, and the Philippines.
How did we get there?
Why did I leave my job to start a business from scratch?
When I started my career, I didn’t intend to start a company. I didn’t even plan to get into sales. When I was at Stanford getting an MBA, like many other students, my career plan was to be a consultant. However, an experienced friend of mine (now the CEO of Stride Travel) told me that he thought I would make a pretty average consultant. However, he thought I had the raw material to become a great salesperson. It made a lot of sense at the time, and I pivoted towards sales and landed a job at IBM after graduating. At IBM, I was selling hardware, software and consulting services — but pretty quickly, it became clear to me that software was the best business to be in. Not only was it the most interesting industry, but it also had the highest margin.
Next, I got involved with software as a service, and I took a job at Google. I found Google to not only be a great work environment with delicious food, but also it was an opportunity to learn and work with some of the most talented people in the world.
Back in 2009 when I was there, Google was putting more focus on the SaaS business. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was an immensely important part of my career and personal development. While my goal was never to be an entrepreneur, I saw a problem that could be solved with a new type of software. The issue was that in order to plan out their day, salespeople had to juggle between a map, a calendar, their routing or schedule, and their customer data — which was often in a CRM system.
This was not a new problem. In fact, it had been a headache for salespeople for hundreds of years, but there had never been a technology platform that could combine a map, a calendar, and customer data. But, in 2012, all these things were starting to come together. The iPhone, the Android and the browser could all run mapping software so I could build a routing system that was connected to a salesperson’s customer data. There were some rough edges and technical limitations at the time, but I was convinced that the iPhone would get stronger, and the Internet would get faster. When Wayne Gretsky gives the advice to ‘skate towards where the puck is going, not where it has been’, this is exactly what he is talking about.
On the personal side, I was 33-years-old with no kids and some financial security, so I felt like I was ready to take the plunge and start a company.
The process
Badger Maps was founded in January of 2012, and from experience I can tell you: Starting a company is a lot harder than you think.
The first thing to do if you need to push a rock uphill is to recruit some other people to push with you. I had meaningful experience on the Sales and Marketing side, but I had almost no experience writing code. So my first step was to recruit a co-founder who could, and I was fortunate enough to find a great one. We started developing the product step-by-step, operating out of the back of a dentist’s office next to a train station in San Francisco.
The biggest challenge, in the beginning, was actually building a solution to that did the most basic things that it would need to do to start getting customers. We understood the problem, we had the solution, but not the resources to build it. That was partly because we had decided to bootstrap our business. This is rather unconventional, but in hindsight I am convinced that it was the right decision for us. If you are expecting to grow exponentially in a highly competitive market, you will need venture capital. But if you are not bringing in enough revenue after a few years, you will be in big trouble with VCs. They need unicorn companies and I did not see Badger Maps as an explosive business that would be worth a billion dollars in 7 years — which is what the VC model is seeking out. The technology needed more time to develop and the market was not too fast-paced. This business would be a marathon, not a sprint.
That meant that we had to figure out how to sell a solution we had not been built yet, to have the money to build that solution. It was a chicken and egg problem. One little trick helped me achieve this. If I noticed a potential fit between our solution and a prospect’s needs, I would say to them:
‘Listen, we agree on what the problem is here and what the solution will need to do to solve it. I can build this solution for you and it will solve these problems that you have. If you sign up and pay now, you’ll get in on the ground floor so you can get our software for 1/10th what it will cost in a year. You’ll also get to have a hand in exactly what it looks like, so it will better solve your specific problems.’’
Naturally, an unfinished product creates an immense risk for any prospective customer. If they pay for something that doesn’t work, they could get in trouble or even be fired. But sometimes, the discount on a product and the chance to bring something cutting edge to their organization will make up for that risk. Some prospects would say ‘no, let’s talk when it’s ready’ — but some would say ‘yes, I’m in!’. And that is how we got our early customers and the revenue that was the lifeblood of the company.
Besides getting our first sales, I remember my early days at Badger Maps being made up of a million small tasks and decisions. ‘What should the logo look like? How much should we charge? Who is the ultimate user group? Who should we hire? How should we structure the company?’ I was part Salesman, Marketer, Lawyer, Recruiter, Product Manager, Accountant, CFO, Public Relations, Human Resources, and of course, there was the Customer Service job — manning the support line (which can be a hard job when the product goes down). The list went on for me, as I’m sure it does for everyone that starts a company.
The key to staying on top of all of this is to stay in a mindset where you 80/20 everything. You can always go back and optimize your work later, but things have to get out the door. Starting a business is like writing, you need a first draft for everything.
Where are we today?
Our strategy is to continue solving real problems and challenges faced by field salespeople, making their lives easier and their careers more successful. Badger is growing at about 40% a year.
I invest a lot of time into hiring and training employees, because I believe a company is just a group of people, and the more satisfied they are, the more the company can achieve. I’m focused on building Badger sustainably on a solid foundation that will last.
When it comes to business development, we follow the principle: Don’t seek to sell, seek to create value. We don’t invest a lot of money into paid advertising. The majority of our deals come from happy customers that recommend our product to other people. And that really speaks to it being an extremely useful product. If you manage to create a product that provides real value by solving real problems, people will buy it.
Advice for other entrepreneurs
Most importantly: Always help your team members out — As a leader, you need to be focused on making the people around you successful in all aspects of their lives. In return, they will make your company successful.
If you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, look for ways to get more hands-on work experience to ‘get yourself ready’. Working for large companies will only get you so far because at a big company, you end up working very specific things. If you want to learn how to run a company, work at a small company.
Smaller organizations offer interdepartmental opportunities to really dip your toes into all facets of a business and learn how they are interconnected. To gain knowledge on how to perform different tasks and understand how they are connected is an extremely beneficial skill for future entrepreneurs.
Remember: It is very hard to start a business. Grit and sales skills are probably the most important abilities for a new entrepreneur. Also, before starting a business, you should feel 100% confident about its success. There are many ways that you can fail, so it’s important that you have a high level of confidence in all the knowable things. Do not take the plunge unless you have full confidence in yourself and your idea — it should feel like a complete lock. In the end, there will be a million unique challenges and in order to succeed you just have to pound your way through them with brute force. For me, it was a lot harder than I imagined, but building Badger has been the most rewarding experience in my life.
