As he prepares for a lengthy sojourn in Silicon Valley, Saeed El-Darahali laid out a lofty goal for his Dartmouth company, the multi-channel marketing startup SimplyCast.
He wants it to at least double its revenues monthly.
That’s right. Double its sales or better. Every. Danged. Month.
SimplyCast was founded in 2009 as a platform-as-a-service product that would help companies and organizations carry out marketing and communication campaigns over email, social media and a range of other channels. A year ago this month, after three years of development, SimplyCast launched its flagship product, the 360 Automation Manager, which allows incredible ease of use in these campaigns.
The product is selling, and revenues are rising at 30 per cent per month, but that’s not enough for the company’s founder and CEO.
“I want growth percentage up to triple digits per month,” said El-Darahali in an interview at the company’s headquarters. “Five per cent is OK, and 50 per cent is good but not good enough. But 100 per cent would be super.”
El-Darahali has never lacked ambition. When the native of the Middle East left his job as a fund manager at Innovacorp in 2009, he said his goal was to build a $1-billion company based in Nova Scotia. He’s never deviated from that goal and never lost his belief that SimplyCast could be such a titan.
The company has grown to 34 employees, virtually all of them in Dartmouth. (One is in South Korea because his wife took a job there.)
The company is not on a hiring binge because El-Darahali believes he has the firepower he needs to drive sales with the 360 Automation Manager.
Certainly, customers have been rolling in lately. On June 3, the company, which already had clients in 175 countries, reported that customer totals of SimplyCast 360 increased 266 per cent in the first quarter.
Customers who have signed up include the Make-A-Wish Atlantic Provinces foundation and cartoonist and marketer Stu Heinecke. SimplyCast has not revealed all its customers, but El-Darahali said they include two banks in the United States and several government agencies.
El-Darahali said the focus of the company is on revenue growth, whereas for the first three years the critical mission was building the platform.
“We couldn’t have had the revenue growth that we’re now seeing if we’d focused on revenue at the start,” he said.
SimplyCast was formed with $758,000 in financing from Innovacorp and Nova Scotia angels. El-Darahali has never raised money outside Nova Scotia. He said he’s been approached by two or three potential investors, purchasers or strategic partners every week but has so far not signed a deal.
“We continue to look for the right partner, but we don’t need the money,” he said. “We haven’t found the right partner yet, and we’re not on our knees.”
Yet within the next two months, he will head to Silicon Valley to meet with potential partners. His options for financing further growth include a public listing, venture capital, private equity or a strategic partner. But he emphasized his main goals for the company — a billion-dollar enterprise based in Nova Scotia — have not changed.
“The public markets are one of the options we would look to in the future. But we want to build this company properly and keep the headquarters in Nova Scotia.”
