Insight
Fulkerson: Open source business models work for infrastructure, never for business applications
“The economics of open source really can work as a business model, as a way to drive down customer acquisition costs if you're talking about infrastructure, but I am unaware of it ever working as a way of, as something that's powering the business model when it…”
Insight
Fulkerson: Startups raising $100M need a $1.2B exit for employee options to pay out
“So in order for a company to see, like, as an employee of a company that's raised a hundred million dollars in capital, for me to see a dime for my incentive stock options, that company has to exit at 1.2 billion dollars.”
Insight
Fulkerson: Most founders fail when monetizing open-source software
“Matt's a great guy, and he was one of the few who traversed that successfully.
There's, most don't, right?
I mean, they just don't.”
Insight
Fulkerson: Open source projects atrophy and die without original founders driving them
“When you don't have a driving force behind it, Like typically the founders of an open source project, they atrophy and die.”
Disclosure
Fulkerson: MindTouch grew to $7 million ARR while fully bootstrapped
“We grew it to seven million ARR on our podcast.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch maintains 96% renewal rate and negative churn
“Our renewal rates are 96%, and we have negative churn.”
Insight
Fulkerson: S&M dollars should yield 1:1 ARR plus 15-20% annual upsell
“What I track is, Hey, if we're spending a dollar, we get back a dollar and that dollar should yield an upsell potential of 15 to 20% annually.”
Disclosure
Aaron Fulkerson was a Marxist and anarchist before starting his business career
“And keep in mind, like in my twenties, man, I was a Marxist. I was an anarchist. I didn't start my career until 30.”
Assertion Supported
Fulkerson: MindTouch counts Salesforce, McKinsey, Whirlpool, and Docker as customers
“Our customers will range from Accenture, McKinsey, Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Amana, Maytag Remington, ElectroLox Fisher & Paykel. So a lot of consumer brands, a lot of software companies. So most of the software unicorns, Zora, Domo, Docker they use MindTouch as …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch Enterprise Deployments Reach Well Into Seven Figures
“So a more typical deployment would look like a Whirlpool and Electrolux, and we're powering these global brands, and we power the agent experience for content, the customer facing, the partner, the field service, and those deployments are well into the seven f…”
Disclosure
MindTouch grew support subscription revenue from $800K in 2008 to $3.5M by 2010
“We first started selling the support subscription in oh eight and we did under a million. It was like eight or 900,000 in, in cash in oh eight. And then we grew that to like three and a half million by 20 10.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch generates low eight figures in annual revenue
“So we're low eight figures.”
Disclosure
Fulkerson: MindTouch has raised only $12 million in institutional capital
“Well, no, I think that's very relevant because total investment into MindTouch, twelve million. Total institutional investment, twelve million.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch was growing ARR at 70% to 80% in 2016
“At the time we were growing at 70, but 70, 80% ARR”
Disclosure
Fulkerson: MindTouch returned to cash flow positivity and break-even
“We just returned to cashflow positivity right now. So we keep it right at breakeven.”
Opinion
Fulkerson: 'The Challenger Customer' Is Better Than 'The Challenger Sale'
“Challenger customer is a great one. It's better than Challenger Sale even.”
Assertion Partly supported
MindTouch was a top 5 global open-source project before 2011 cloud launch
“In fact, it was in the top five open source projects in the world, doing thousands of downloads every day, and
We did that back in 2000.
Well, we shipped the first version of the open source code in 2006.
And then we released our first cloud version of the pro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch processes about 1B events monthly
“And then if you look at like our number of events that we do monthly, we're doing like a billion events monthly.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fulkerson: MindTouch operates with a team of 100 people
“We're a hundred people here.”
Aaron Fulkerson