You could say Jeff Perlman and Corneliu Tusnea run an internet plumbing business; their platform, OneSaas, connects virtual pipes; integrating the APIs of a bunch of well-known cloud applications, allowing businesses to sync data across their different applications.
For example, a clothing retailer could integrate its email marketing, point-of-sale software, accounting and payroll, and see how sales are tracking in real-time, manage orders across a number of different online stores or check which suppliers have been paid.
“It’s lots of work as all those systems continuously change,” says Tusnea, CTO and founder of OneSaas. “We’re trying to manage the demand.”
The relationship with other companies varies: one third have commercial agreements, another third have co-marketing agreements, the rest have informal arrangements. For example, hosted business phone service Ringio has a wholesale agreement, where it uses the OneSaas back-end to manage its CRM service. Other companies have agreed to host webinars, events or share OneSaas marketing materials with customers.
Tusnea first started working on OneSaas in 2008, while juggling a number of online stores he was managing, and some consulting work. In 2011, he pitched OneSaas as a concept at SydStart and was told by a number of people that the technical problems would be too hard to overcome. At the end of the pitch, he revealed that he was already running an initial trial with 30 customers. In November of that year he launched a beta version providing integrations with Saasu, Adobe Business Catalyst, Google Contacts, and Campaign Monitor. A year later he brought in Jeff Perlman as CEO — Perlman now runs the business side, while Tusnea manages the tech operations.
It can be difficult deciding which APIs to integrate, because of the time and investment required. One in four of the companies requesting integrations are other startups; Perlman says OneSaas looks at whether they have funding, a strong plan and proof of traction prior to negotiating any agreement. Because of the development time required to build in new APIs, OneSaas is essentially investing in any new platforms it integrates in. It needs to be confident the other business is sustainable. Perlman says that the company asks a number of questions before establishing new partnerships.
“We ask ourselves whether it’s something we believe in. We need to be sure that the application is growing, it’s a decent product and there is a plan.”
OneSaas raised a $380k seed round earlier in May of this year, from two private investors. The investment enabled them to achieve some clear goals; earlier in the year OneSaas committed to establishing a reseller program, building a new website, and increasing the capacity of the development team.
The company currently has 9 full-time employees and two part-time contractors, based out of the office in St Leonards. Perlman and Tusnea say their relationship works well as both have unique skills.
The pair shared an office space while working on a project together — at the time, Perlman was at VISA and Tusnea at Microsoft. Perlman while they both have very strong views they understand how each other operate; “Corneliu runs development, and I run the business,” says Perlman. All staff participate in a daily standup meeting which helps with decision making and allows the company to be responsive.
The company now has 2600 active business accounts. OneSaas charges an initial setup fee and then an ongoing subscription of between $10-35 a month. For point of sale users (e.g., a clothes retailer), there is a sliding fee structure for each additional store. “One of the fun things is to watch our customers grow,” says Tusnea. He mentions an e-commerce company which uses the OneSaas platform, and has gone from doing 5-10 sales a week to 50-100 orders a day. It’s revenue is now in the millions.
The company launched its reseller program last month, to try and drive signups by leveraging the existing customers of other service providers, like accounting firms and software developers. Since launching the program last month, the company has had 80 resellers sign up— around 25% of these are now driving recurring sales. In order to prevent companies from signing up just to get a free account, OneSaas offers a trailing commission: 10% of the sign up for the first five customers, then 30% for each customer after that.
The sliding price scale is a tactic used by lots of providers. It makes sense — charge your customers a minimal fee (or don’t charge them at all) when they are starting out, and then as they grow, you hope they continue to drive business your way. Email campaign platform MailChimp is a perfect example of this; it’s free to use when you have less than 2000 subscribers, but increase your subscribers above that, and you start to pay.
OneSaas has been stepping up its marketing and sales lately in an effort to grow the number of customers. Perlman pitched OneSaas at Tech23 in October, winning the Paypal Customer First Award, CSIRO ICT Most Potential to Transform Australia Award, and meetings with OneVentures group. Perlman says Tech23 provided an opportunity to network and promote OneSaas to potential customers, and also helped get on the radar of a couple VCs.
“We want these partners to be genuine,” says Perlman. “While we have to hold their hand the first time through, by the second, third, fourth time — they should be able to do it without a lot of support.”