Scott Desgrosseilliers is the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a leading multi-touch marketing attribution software for SMBs who use paid online advertising. Scott is a data and analytics expert who saw the costly limitations of simple performance reports from popular ad platforms. 

Wicked Reports was started as a bootstrapped software company in 2016 to serve smaller companies that spend millions on digital ads and other marketing, including email, SEO, and digital events. Determining which marketing activities drive incremental revenue is a tricky puzzle to unravel, but the payback of those insights is huge. 

Scott raised a little angel funding and a little SaaS debt and is still going strong with 28 employees and is figuring out their growth and retention puzzle to accelerate growth.

Quote from Scott Desgrosseilliers, founder and CEO of Wicked Reports

"We had offers, and we could have raised VC funding early on, but then the growth rate we would have had to hit was too high, which didn't make sense for our business.

"A competitor of ours took $20 million from a similar VC, and then they had to cut a third of their team. I'm not saying anything against them. They have a nice product and they seem like good guys. They hired a ton of people and didn't hit the growth number, so they had to whack a bunch of them.

"Money isn't always the answer. I'm sure there are cases where it solved all sorts of problems, but most VCs want to invest when you already have growth and net revenue retention at 120% when the efficient growth problem's already solved!"

Links

• Scott Desgrosseilliers on LinkedIn
• Wicked Reports on LinkedIn
• Wicked Reports website

Podcast Sponsor - Full Scale

This week’s podcast is sponsored by Full Scale, one of the fastest-growing software development companies in any region. Full Scale vets, employs, and supports over 300 professional developers, designers, and testers in the Philippines who can augment and extend your core dev team. Learn more at fullscale.io.

The Practical Founders Podcast

Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel.

Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com/newsletter.