The Inspiring Origin Story of OC's Cirrus Insight - Part 1
A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff:
Brandon Bruce and I started Cirrus Insight over 10 years ago.
I was the CEO and managed Product and Technology on a day-to-day basis from Irvine, CA. Brandon was the COO, handling Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support from Knoxville, TN. We helped companies make the most of their Salesforce.com investment by bringing their CRM into the Inbox — and we were doing it before it was cool.
A few milestones:
- We bootstrapped the company to over $12M ARR,
- We were on the Inc 5000 List 3 times (#41 in 2016!),
- We were the highest-rated app on the AppExchange for several years,
- We topped out at over 70 employees while I led the company,
- We acquired four companies,
- We exited to a private equity firm
When we started, we knew nothing about building and running a company. We certainly didn’t know how to support an application that would get millions of requests daily.
This will be the start of a series of posts about how we figured out a solution to problems, one by one, day after day, every day. And the mistakes we made along the way.
The Idea 💡
Back around 2010, a company called Rapportive was started. It had the clever idea of bringing LinkedIn into Gmail, giving it a home on the right side of the inbox. They had one of those mythological startup stories where someone “accidentally” and unknowingly launched before they meant to… By morning, they had over 10,000 new users.
I found Rapportive a few months after its launch, and I noticed that I was using LinkedIn a lot more as a result. I was running a Salesforce.com consulting practice at the time, and I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if that was Salesforce?” ⚡️
I did some research and couldn’t find anything like this (it might be hard to believe that given the number of solutions like this today but in 2011, it was true). And so I just jumped right in and started coding!
Just kidding. I sat on the idea for months.
It seemed like such an obvious idea that if it wasn’t already around, someone had to be working on it. I would do another search a month or two later, and then...
Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...
Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.
Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.
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