[andyfowler]

We became profitable at http://nutshell.com/ about 2.5 years after we launched. Building something as expansive as a CRM takes a lot of time. We made the decision to begin at the small end of the market (with pricing to match), and started with a lot of small customers as we scaled the product to bigger companies.

We also have higher expenses in terms of our support team (3 full-time) — there are higher expectations for sharp, fast support in an industry like CRM.

[not_paul_graham]

If you don't mind sharing, I'd love to know some more. According to what you've written plus your website: founded in 2010 (FOWD), so broke even sometime in 2013, and currently supporting 14ish people + is profitable. Kudos. That is really cool.

- How many founders do you all have?

- How did you get your initial set of (small) customers?

- How are you all expanding to new customers (bigger customers): via advertising? word of mouth? initial customers increasing seats? other? salesmen ?

- Why did you all pick CRM initially? (isn't it pretty crowded already: SugarCRM, ZOHO, Oracle, et al.). I'm genuinely curious as I don't know much about the market.

Thanks.

[andyfowler]

> - How many founders do you all have?

There are four of us on the founding team — three of whom have some other obligations, and myself. I spend 90% of my day coding or working on product with our designer.

> - How did you get your initial set of (small) customers?

Primarily through Google Adwords. Initially we had an inside sales rep who worked hard to talk to every trial, even if it meant spending a few hours walking a 4-user shop into signing up.

We were also one of the early CRMs to be in the Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace (i.e. integration w/ Google Apps). We got some free front-and-center placement there, and this brought in a lot of customers. This was in summer 2011, and for a while it doubled our monthly trials.

> - How are you all expanding to new customers (bigger customers): via advertising? word of mouth? initial customers increasing seats? other? salesmen ?

We’re definitely spiraling into more organic growth. We’re also doubling down on some more marketing efforts like a booth and sponsorships at SXSW. The product has also matured quite a bit into a place where it’s a genuine competitor with the lower end of the Salesforce market.

And we’re doubling down on integrations with other services, which (in my mind) is the “partner / channel program” of the SaaS world.

But this is an area of interest to me, and one we’ve been talking about a lot. I’m interested to hear what others are doing in the heavy growth area.

> - Why did you all pick CRM initially? (isn't it pretty crowded already: SugarCRM, ZOHO, Oracle, et al.). I'm genuinely curious as I don't know much about the market.

It was borne out of the sheer ineptitude of the market. Salesforce is ugly, expensive and nobody likes it. Sugar is an OSS clone of Salesforce. Zoho is trying to be Microsoft Exchange as well as CRM. </hyperbole>

We focused on bringing beautiful design and ease of use to CRM: something that a lot of smart people are doing to various components of business software (Freshbooks, MailChimp, etc.)