Blackthorne

Chris started Blackthorne with a thesis to build payments and events applications on the Salesforce platform, targeting anyone who might need this infrastructure. But early on, he realized that spray-and-pray go-to-market strategy doesn't work. By analyzing incoming leads, he noticed most were coming from two specific verticals: higher education and nonprofits. "At the time, we had no go to market, and I thought go to market was like this baloney term, but this is a real thing," he recalls. Rather than selling $2-5K subscriptions widely, he made a bold decision to focus exclusively on these two verticals and pursue much larger deals—$50K, $100K+ base subscriptions.

Blackthorne's journey wasn't a straight line. Over four years (mid-2015 to early-2019), Chris built and killed nine different products: a form builder (Blackthorne Documents), a customer portal, a billing app, an e-commerce app, and even a donations app. "Unlike Field of Dreams, they came but they didn't come because no one wanted to pay for this thing," he says of the donations app. The problem was that many of these products couldn't support the $50K+ pricing model he needed to scale. Professional services initially funded the business—about $1M annually for the first few years. By 2019, after ruthlessly killing weak product lines, Blackthorne was down to two core offerings: payments and events. This focus became the foundation for everything that followed.

The Salesforce App Exchange was Blackthorne's initial distribution channel, but scaling required a deliberate go-to-market strategy. System integrators—the partners who build solutions when enterprises buy big systems—became the real engine: "That's like 75% of our leads that we have now." To expand the product beyond core payments and events, Chris pursued strategic acquisitions. In 2018, he bought PCI-fi (a PCI compliance app generating $130K ARR) for $850K paid over 2.5 years. More significantly, when customers demanded SMS capabilities, instead of building it, he identified and acquired Texty—a single-developer Salesforce SMS app generating $550K ARR—for $3.25M ($1.2M down, $2M over 24 months, funded through a debt facility). These acquisitions expanded Blackthorne's product suite while keeping the team lean.

Pricing proved to be Chris's biggest lesson. "Founders suck at pricing," he admits. Early on, he had 930 different prices in his Stripe product catalog—a unique price for nearly every customer. Once he started systematically raising prices, the results were dramatic: the payments app became 2.5x more expensive (with the largest customer now at $1M annually instead of $100K), and the events app became 4x more expensive (average deal size jumping from $12K to $45K). He learned to tell a story rather than list features: instead of promoting "payments, pay link, document link," he positioned the offering as an integrated platform for higher ed and nonprofit event and fundraising workflows.

Partnerships were mixed. Integrations with other payment gateways and event apps consumed time with no revenue upside—"they just wanted to integrate us to say, hey, we're on Salesforce." But the Stripe partnership became brilliant: Blackthorne offers customers Stripe integration with zero markups, earning "somewhere in the vicinity of a million a year" from Stripe's revenue share. This win-win became a powerful differentiator.

At 7.5 years in, Blackthorne runs $14M ARR with 105 employees across 25 US states and 15 countries, all remote. With $14M of an $18M debt facility drawn and no VC or board, Chris has maintained capital efficiency and strategic control. The company has processed $3B in payments, sent 31M SMS messages, and serves ~630 customers. Rather than scaling from his earlier mistakes, Chris reorganized his leadership: just two direct reports (COO and Director of Product) plus a future CTO, allowing him to focus on product and R&D. The next big launch is a storefront app for executive education—"basically a Shopify for Salesforce"—born entirely from customer feedback. Chris also commits 1% of revenue to Stripe Climate ($120K donated to date) and $3K monthly to Watsi.org, building culture around shared values. His core playbook: ruthlessly focus on what works, kill weak products aggressively, raise prices until customers push back hard, listen obsessively to customers, and pursue partnerships that create mutual value.