How Processmaker CEO Sunny Putra (SP) grew Processmaker to $22M revenue and 350 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Brian real he's a serial entrepreneur and his current company is called process maker com before that he found it in later sold at telecoms in the telecom space a long-distance voice and data carrier based out of South America he graduated from Duke University in 1993 and was a Fulbright Scholar in linguistics in Ecuador 1994 Brian are you ready to take it to the top I am alright tell us about process maker what's it do and what's your business model how do you make money yeah so process maker is it's all about automating processes so these tend to be the request and approval processes so basically anything that involves a form that's pulling in data and it's being routed for approval so that's a bit of a mouthful so to give you some examples we're talking about credit requests credit applications for banks and we have a lot of banking customers we're talking about purchase requests for a lot of manufacturing companies we have a lot of manufacturing companies and in higher ed it could be something like a great change request transfer request a professor ascension process a request or any kind of change management type requests okay I mean is this like plumbing that's going on behind the scenes you're connecting api's or yeah good question so it can be more plumbing but it also can be less plumbing so a lot of times it is actually the the interface itself and then it's got some plumbing behind the scenes so we're connecting API is to bring in data mostly from systems like core systems ERPs CRMs and then we're sort of routing that for humans to make approvals and generate changes in the information which gets put back in through the plumbing back into the core systems back into the ERP s or core system so when I bring up off the top of my head some some folks that I think about when I when you give me that description I think of segments or koto elastic zapier snap logic jitter bit kind of companies what do you think when you hear those companies relative to what you do so kind of jitter bits and and Xavier's or snap logic those would be a little more into a category called integration platform as-a-service so we're in kind of business process management BPM or workflow so workflow and BPM has an element an overlap with integration form so we do do integration but a lot of times we'll see customers that already have an integration platform which is good news for us because then it makes it easier to get the data we want in and out and we're gonna be much more of the kind of human powered forms that are getting routed around so those kind of companies won't do very well with the approval and and rejection part of a workflow - the key element there's like it's some human form they're filling out it's a PDF they're printing and scanning back to a email for something things like that exactly there's usually this idea of a validation and Europe book call it kind of validations we tend to look at it as approval approval reject decision moments that's kind of where workflow comes in got it that makes good sense tell me about the model is it pure sass or what's your revenue model so it's not pure sass we do both on premise and sass sass has been as you can imagine growing sort of faster in more recent years the reason there's still a lot of on premise is because this is deals with a lot of plumbing as you mentioned and it is very much mid market and enterprise so there's a lot of legacy systems a lot of legacy systems where we're being brought in because we have greater flexibility better front ends but there are enterprises which are still doing a lot of that on premise so still want it still want it on premise so we do both and in as the on-prem stuff though is it still in terms of how it hits your cash flow statements or your balance sheets I mean this it's still a predictable annual kind of event or no yeah for us it's the same it's still a an annual subscription revenue we charge upfront and and they look and act the same way from a support perspective they're a little bit different interesting okay and give me a general sense of the size of these bad boys are we talking ten granny or a hundred granny or a million a year or more so we're talking sort of 2530 gram would be kind of average contract value for us and and that doesn't include potentially professional services which might be done by us or by partners around the world so this is kind of mid market and above and it's tending it's trending upwards for us as we go kind of further into mid market and enterprise type clients got a net just to be close with an annual $30,000 contra right correct yep interesting let's get more your backstory here what you did you launched the company in so we launched process maker in 2008 the company was actually around for eight years previously when we started under a totally different premise that sort of didn't work out and kind of almost called it quits around you know around 2002 2003 but then kind of kept going with some different types of projects we were working on in about 2008 sort of discovered what we really wanted to do which was workflow and launched process maker as an open source project in 2008 we had sort of one employee then and that's really when it when it sort of took off and defined took off well we are organically kind of grown and have grown that the business very much organically since then does that mean that we're bootstrapped yeah so today we're about a hundred and forty employees worldwide so that happened between 2008 and today so not exactly sort of overnight but that's I think for bootstrapping that's it's never static Brian we've you know I know that it's never over and out ever over all right and where's headquarters there's a Durham it's Durham North Carolina yes yeah yeah very interesting okay so walk me through I want to understand you said it in 2000 like early 2008 quote didn't work out what wasn't working out and how did you have the intuition to know you got to change something so we started business in 2000 we set it up to do a reverse tradings auction site for directors and officers liability insurance okay let me sleep so I know I didn't yeah I'm just kidding so that turned out to be right at the the back end of the the.com crash and it was very difficult to raise money we sort of needed to raise money to do that so we just at that point had a few developers on staff we ended up taking on some random projects and we were basically doing websites and database systems and then eventually got a customer and sort of reflected upon what we were doing and it looked and felt like workflow so we started calling it workflow interesting so so to kind of survive there in the middle you took on some custom you know lower margin but higher contract you know you know cash in the bank quickly kind of things to sustain yourself yeah and we were my other co-founder went back to his day job I had a day job so we were basically doing whatever we could to just sort of keep the doors open for a period there and you made it through that that that down point I guess we'll call it what do yet today in terms of total customers are serving so today around 350 customers really around the world Enterprise mid-market customers and generally growing at what rate would you say so we grow our subscription business around thirty thirty five percent a year so you know we take a relatively conservative approach since it's our money and we will demand your be strapped to that's healthy growth for bootstrap company yeah you're in full control the cap table yes you and your founder co-founder yeah yeah in fact a couple years back we kind of helped we cleaned it up a bit with a couple good years we had just realizing that when you're when you're bootstrapping it really helps to have have that control as you kind of mention reliable is it why this is a really important lesson here because a lot of entrepreneurs when I dig they do some form of cap table cleaning especially if it's a company that's been around for a while with a bunch of pivots why was it quote dirty in the first place in other words how did people get on it in the first place was it friends and family and aims around hourly employees and how did you negotiate to kind of quote clean it up yeah good question so as I mentioned since we started off with a very much a different business plan we initially took on some friends and family money that was in a that was under the assumption of the previous business plan which had to do purely with insurance and reinsurance specifically they had been around for a long time so that sort of expectation of a momentous sort of exit right around the corner didn't happen for them so we wanted to provide them a way out and we had one sort of interesting event along the way provided some liquidity some cash for us so we decided hey it's a good time to to let those very early investors get out and then it gives us gave us more flexibility going forward to sort of manage the business in a slightly different way and what was the fortunate event we ended up having a small piece of small M&A transaction where we sold off an asset we we had created that's still under confidentiality but we ended up building the workflow that's deeply embedded in a in a leading enterprise system ended up kind of learning our lesson because the code slowly got forked we realized it was going to be better to try and sell that off so we did and then we took that cash and we were able to clean it up and pay...