Process Street
Vinay Patankar launched Process Street in 2013, initially as a side project. The product aimed to make workflow management intuitive for people without business training, rather than requiring knowledge of enterprise concepts like BPMN or flow diagrams.
The company raised a seed round through a convertible note roughly a year and a half before this interview, which Vinay said is when it built a proper engineering team and moved from prototype to product. Angelpad was its accelerator, and Vinay described the deal as six percent for $55K. Total funding raised is $1.3 million.
SEO has been the company's strongest channel. The blog reportedly gets about 200,000 visits a month, roughly doubling each year on a flat spend, and the cost to acquire a customer through SEO is about $150. Average deal size is around $2,000 per year, and expansion revenue runs 20 to 30 percent of monthly revenue. Vinay said the company is focusing this year on increasing average contract value and building sales infrastructure rather than spending more at the top of the funnel.
As of the interview, Process Street had 500 to 1,000 customers and 21 employees, with 15 of them in marketing or sales. The company planned to raise an A round in early 2018 and targeted a run rate of $1.5M to $2.5M ARR.
- •Targeting users without business or workflow-software expertise lets the product compete on ease of use against enterprise incumbents.
- •A blog-driven SEO engine that grows traffic each year on flat spend lowers acquisition cost over time, which is why the $150 CAC is sustainable.
- •Expansion revenue of 20 to 30 percent of monthly revenue means existing customers grow the business without additional acquisition spend.
- •Focusing on sales conversion before increasing top-of-funnel spend protects unit economics as the company scales.
- 1.Pick a niche with complex incumbent tools and build a simpler, more intuitive alternative aimed at non-experts.
- 2.Build a content library targeting the keywords your buyers search for, and keep spend flat while traffic compounds.
- 3.Track cost per customer by acquisition channel, using SEO cohorts to measure signups against spend.
- 4.Offer annual plan discounts and occasional two-year contracts to pull cash forward and raise lifetime value.
- 5.Improve conversion and average contract value before spending heavily on top-of-funnel acquisition.
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