Insight
Camara: Founders should not write code without six-figure deposit commitments
“My threshold, if I ever do this again, would be I would not start cutting a line of code unless I can get, you know, six figure order form deposits on the basis of a PowerPoint deck. If I'm unable to do that, I either have not identified a painful enough of a …”
Opinion
Camara: Canada lacks a strong mid-market compared to the US
“Canada doesn't have a very big mid market, but the United States does. And I, you know, and I think that's one thing that, that, that does create some inefficiency in Canadian founders is in their home market. There's not a great mid market.”
Insight
Camara: Founders should extract the wisdom embedded in legacy software
“There's a lot of wisdom built in legacy systems. People dismiss them as old and clunky at the time they weren't. And at the time someone went through a product process. Over years and years and years to build something. And there's tons of wisdom in those lega…”
Insight
Camara: Competitors struggle by designing for lawyers instead of paralegals
“We have some competitors today and had a very similar origin story to me where corporate lawyers observed the problem. They missed that step of like, okay, we got to sit down and spend six months with the primary users of this product. And tear down their day …”
Insight
Camara: Delivery-contingent enterprise contracts create massive startup risk
“Our first, like our first iteration of our first customers, they were contracts with deposits, but the balance was due on delivery of the product, which is when you're selling into, you know, mid market enterprise, that's super high risk because the definition…”
Insight
Camara: Enterprise co-development requires champions willing to take career risk
“The one thing that I realized is like, if you want to do this co-development process with mid-market or enterprise, you have to find people in those organizations that are willing to take a lot of risk.”
Disclosure
Camara: Athennian lost its anchor co-development partner 30 days after raising $500k
“I raised that on the strength of a large logo co-development partner. Who then the relationship literally dissolved 30 days after we had closed that half a million dollars.”
Insight
Camara: Stated enterprise software requirements represent at most 30% of build needs
“What they tell you is probably, you know, 30% at most of what you need to actually build to get that cash flowing. And that said that 60 to 70% is that unspoken requirement of, you know, assumptions.”
Insight
Adrian Camara: Realistic enterprise SaaS sales cycles run 18 to 36 months
“If you're being realistic about enterprise, like look at the benchmarks, it says 12 to 18 months. That's the best case scenario, right? Like it's really three years, depending where it's like, you know, 18 months to three years.”
Disclosure
Camara: Athennian refuses contract addendums unless features are pre-planned on roadmap
“We very, very, very rarely make product commitments on contracts and stuff like that, unless it's something, it's already on the roadmap, and maybe we're bringing it forward by six months, we were going to do it. In Q four, we'll do it in Q two, if that's what…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Camara: Entity management market is 50/50 spreadsheets and legacy software
“The market's like, 50, 50 brownfield and spreadsheets where, you know, brownfield is legacy, really old legacy stuff that you have to rip and replace, you know, out of the market.”
Disclosure
Camara: Athennian used customer discovery workflow charts as its year-one sales pitch
“Showing those early customers, the work we put in, like that was my sales pitch. I literally brought up those Visio charts was just like, you know, like kind of like a mirror board type of thing. And like, that was my sales pitch for the first year is I sat do…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Camara: Customers began listing Athennian experience in paralegal job requirements
“When I saw a customer post a job description for a paralegal and on it had experience with Athenian strongly preferred or, you know, like, you know, a strong asset, some type of language like that.”
