“quality product to the rest of the world” and shedding its label of being the “world’s best-kept secret.” In Madrona and Ignition, he saw the kind of expertise in sales and marketing software, the kind of “intellectual horsepower,” that could help the company get a much larger customer base.
“When you’re reinvesting dollars [revenues], you can only grow at a certain clip,” he explains. That means you can only sign up so many customers per quarter, target a limited number of new customers, and go to one or two big trade shows a year, instead of five or 10, for example. All of that is about to change, he says.
That Appature is doing it with all homegrown investors—despite plenty of discussions with Silicon Valley and East Coast venture firms—is a plus, in Shahani’s view. “We’re very committed to the region,” he says. He adds that Appature wants to be a source of significant job growth in the Seattle area.
It all sounds pretty ambitious—especially given the modest amount of funding. But Shahani says the company will be hiring, primarily for sales and marketing positions, over time. “We’ve always taken a stance of fiscal responsibility. Our eyeballs will be on margins very tightly,” he says. Appature currently has 11 full-time employees.
In recent months, Appature has released a number of new features and side projects, including “sentiment analysis” that helps marketers monitor and understand people’s feelings on the Web about brands, products, and other topics. The company also has developed its own Twitter search engine called Chatterfly.
