Komiko

Hal spent nearly two decades at Microsoft, most recently leading the Dynamics ERP development team. After 20 years building product at one of the world's largest software companies, he reached an inflection point. "I had reached a point where I felt like I had a great team around me who were capable of moving the business forward, and I was interested in starting over again and building something new," he explained. He left Microsoft in 2014 and took a few months to consider ideas before founding Komiko on February 15, 2015.

Hal had become convinced that new technologies weren't being exploited well in business applications. Most business apps were "form in front of a database with some kind of report being run at the end of the day." Users treated them as burdens rather than benefits. A salesperson doing data entry in a CRM didn't love their CRM system. Komiko's idea was different: become a tool that actually helps salespeople understand day-to-day what's working with customers.

The company stayed lean from the start. By the time of this interview, Komiko had just 10 full-time employees (8 engineers) based in Seattle. Despite the small team, they'd built a sophisticated product using cloud infrastructure, integrating with email, calendar, phone logs, and CRM systems. They also partnered with services like Full Contact and Clear Bit to enrich data.

The pricing model was simple: $30-35 per user per month. By mid-2016, they had 2,000 seats across roughly 50 customers, which put them at approximately $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Customers ranged from 3 to 500 users.

Initially, growth came entirely inbound. Komiko was listed on the Salesforce App Exchange, had their own website, and benefited enormously from Hal's network from his Microsoft days. "We were able to drive a lot of business just by inbound people referring or reaching out to us," he said. Most customers were Salesforce users, and Komiko positioned itself as complementary, not competitive—helping enrich CRM data rather than replace it.

Churn was essentially non-existent. The company had only lost 4 customers in its entire history: one acquired by another company, one that went through a management change, and two early-stage test accounts. This indicated strong product-market fit.

Later in the year, they started an outbound campaign focused on the customer success space and launched a partnership with Gainsight (a customer success platform), which required no direct payment but added value to both sides.

They'd raised roughly $2 million total—an initial convertible round from friends and family, then a priced seed round in August from Founders Co-op. The post-money valuation on the seed round was approximately $11 million.

Gross margins were healthy at around 75%, even at small scale. Hosting costs were roughly $89 per tenant, leaving strong economics on the $30-35 per-seat price.

In 2015 (their first partial year), revenue was $15,000. In 2016, they did $120,000 in annual revenue. By mid-2017, at a $60k MRR run rate, Hal's goal was to hit $1 million ARR by the end of the year—roughly 18 months from commercialization. If they hit that target, it would represent exceptional growth for a bootstrapped, lean team.