InVesp

Khalid Salid was a top software architect earning close to $100K annually, working for Fortune 500 companies like American Express and Motorola. Despite his comfortable six-figure consulting salary and prestigious position—he was considered one of the top 50 software architects in North America with a $2,500 daily billing rate—he felt constrained. "An amazing employee, but extremely difficult to manage," is how colleagues described him. The turning point came while architecting software for Motorola: he witnessed how the company struggled with a fundamental problem. "They were getting millions of visitors to their website, but not enough of those visitors were converting." This insight sparked the idea to build a conversion optimization consulting practice.

At age 31-32, Khalid took the leap. "The first nine months, I struggled and there were moments where we really doubted ourselves," he recalls. He founded InVesp in 2006 with his wife as a co-founder and partner, taking on a significant pay cut from his corporate salary. The company did approximately $15-20K in first-year revenue while Khalid was still working other gigs to make ends meet. The business model was straightforward: conduct deep analytics reviews of client websites, identify conversion leaks, design improvements, and use A/B and multivariate testing to validate which changes actually worked. "We go through the analytics for the website, determine what are the weak areas, introduce new designs, then we use either AB or multivariate testing, split the visitors between the old designs and the new designs and let the visitors be the judge."

Khalid and his wife bootstrapped the consulting business, focusing on helping enterprise clients optimize their conversion funnels. The company's reputation grew steadily, and they landed major clients including eBay, O'Reilly, 3M, and Dish Network. InVesp's pricing model was aggressive: a minimum of $8,000 per month retainer, scaling up based on project complexity. Clients typically stayed for 15-24 months as long as InVesp continued to increase their sales. This model proved effective—by 2011, just five years after launch, the company hit $1 million in annual revenue.

The consulting business grew steadily through the mid-2010s, but Khalid realized the ceiling. In 2014, about eight years in, he made a strategic pivot: the company would shift toward building a SaaS platform while intentionally slowing down new consulting projects and raising fees to reduce capacity. "We're going to start slowing the number of projects that we take, increase our fees a little bit, take a few more projects and focus on our software." The goal was to build a full conversion optimization SaaS platform with A/B testing, heatmaps, video recording, exit-intent pop-ups, and analytics. The original plan was a May 2016 beta launch, though the company faced challenges navigating a crowded market with well-funded competitors like Optimizely, VWO, and Omniture already established. Rather than compete on A/B testing alone, Khalid decided to differentiate by offering a broader feature set across multiple conversion tools within one platform. By 2016, InVesp had 14 full-time employees.

Khalid turned down venture funding offers despite significant interest. A Russian VC offered $1.5-2 million for 35-45% equity, while a German firm offered €1.8 million for 30%. A Russian contact suggested U.S. VCs would value the company at roughly the same dollar amount for 20-25% equity. Rather than dilute the cap table, Khalid chose to self-fund the SaaS transition using the consulting business's cash flow. The company was redesigning its website and product positioning for the new SaaS offering, which would be structured as a product under the InVesp umbrella with the same ownership structure as the parent consulting business. At age 41, married with four kids, Khalid was working 80-90 hours per week, often sleeping just 5 hours per night. His reflection on success: "I need to be really laser sharp focus. There is just opportunity everywhere. You just need to pick the right thing, focus on it and you'll do really well."