In my previous post, I shared a little bit about our history. If you haven’t read that post yet, it might make sense to pause this one and check it out.
I’d like to expand that history a bit because I believe it will help give our readers both context around where we’ve been and confidence in where we’re going.
In 2005, I joined a small software company by the name of Enovasys, LLC. I was employee #17. Of course, you wouldn’t have known it by that name because at the time it was doing business as Infusion Software & Consulting. Since our domain was infusionsoft.com, customers began referring to us as Infusionsoft.
While there, I met my now business partner, Dustin Lunt. After working at “Infusionsoft” for 4 years, we saw the staff grow to 120 employees and the revenue multiples to match. We worked in various roles in the organization, doing anything and everything we could to help the business grow.
My time there is full of fond memories, and priceless lessons learned. I was able to be on the learning end of some phenomenal leaders. I loved the product, I loved the people, I loved the community they had built. That’s why when I caught the entrepreneurial bug, it made sense to stay close to “home” and serve their market.
Making the Leap
We’ve made two massive leaps this past decade. The first of course was making the shift from employee to entrepreneur. I’m not sure if it’s due to the fact that the first leap happened much longer ago, but that leap seemed much easier than our second.
The second leap was closing the marketing agency side of our business which had grown to be a $1,000,000.00/year revenue generating machine? Why did we do it?
We were simply returning to our roots. SaaS (Software as a Service).
We love tech. We love automation. And building something of our own that combined the love of tech and automation required our full attention. We used revenue from our marketing agency to invest in product creation and marketing, while gradually replacing agency clients with paying software subscribers.
The process took faith, and I’m grateful to say, it was the right decision.
What’s in a name?
So then we found ourselves making introductions as a SaaS company called, Marketing Mavens. As you can imagine, there’s an instant disconnect there, and a whole lot of explaining to do. We decided to file a dba, ‘LEAP’.
While we don’t do any marketing of the LEAP brand, it tells our story in one word. We made the leap from employees to entrepreneurs. And then we made the leap from digital marketers to SaaS makers.
Bootstrapping Parsey
We didn’t take a dollar in loans or investments to create, market or sell Parsey. That’s important for a few reasons.
1. Instead of seeking more resources, we learned to be resourceful.
2. Because we own 100% of the company, we obsess over the details.
3. We’re not out to please investors. We answer to no one but our customers.
We’re on a mission to help businesses grow. We do that by delivering powerful tools and phenomenal customer service. Since building Parsey, we’ve released two other self-funded apps, Graphly and Evidence. Again, if you’ve been with us for a while, you probably already know about these solutions. If not, now might be a good time to check them out.
The truth is, we love solving problems for businesses. In addition to what we’re doing with Parsey and workflow automation, we can likely help you in other ways.
Okay, now back to Parsey. We’ve seen a great app be built, sold and supported during our time at Infusionsoft (now Keap). We saw a lot of wins, and some losses. You can bet that we’ve been modeling off the successes we witnessed first hand. We’ve also been doing our best to avoid the failures and pitfalls.
We are currently working on a new UI update for Parsey, additional features and functionality and of course, more integrations. Our integration list is growing daily. More on future enhancements in upcoming posts. We’ve already brought more than 5,700 businesses on the platform and we’re looking to reach 8,500 by the end of the year. Help us out by sharing this post.
We’d like to hear your origin story…
Challenge: share your entrepreneurial origin story with us, using just 100 words or less in the comment section below.