Sameer Gulati recently shared insights on scaling a startup outside of Silicon Valley with the audience at the Tom Tom festival in Charlottesville, Virginia. He took the stage with Entrepreneur's Editor in Chief, Jason Feifer, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund Partner, David Hall, and STORD's Co-founder and CEO Sean Henry. 

Throughout the panel discussion, Jason as moderator was able to explore the differences between East Coast and West Coast Venture Capital (traction vs potential). The four panelists also discussed how to prove product market fit during the early phase of an organization's life cycle, and what it means to scale a business outside of a major tech hub like New York City, Silicon Valley, or Boston.

This series of blog posts is exploring companies in the emerging performance economy. Performance based pricing—also known as outcome-based pricing or results-based pricing—refers to a pricing model where the product is priced based on the customers’ expense reduction or revenue gained as a result of the adoption that product.

In the first two posts of this series, we covered performance-based pricing models that use revenue gained as the lever for shifts in pricing.

• [24/7].ai leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning, combined with human intelligence, to create a personalized, predictive, and effortless customer experience.
• Clerk.io helps companies drive sales by using artificial intelligence to power a personalized shopping experience, for every customer in their online store.

In performance economy spotlight #3, we’ll look at the other side of the performance-based pricing coin—using expense/cost reduction, rather than revenue gained, as a mechanism for setting customers’ price. What better industry to examine cost reduction than sourcing and procurement? LevaData stood out as an interesting company planting a flag deep into the performance economy.

As companies scale, especially in this SaaS-dominated economy, management teams will sooner or later be confronted with a build vs buy decision. All companies large or small, tend towards wanting to control everything they can. Compounding this natural inclination, if something is painful but “working,” they push making hard choices down the road. It's difficult to uncover what an organization is best suited to own fully, and what is worthy to hand off to external partners.

In the first of four posts exploring companies that are embracing the emerging performance economy we highlighted [24]7.ai. [24]7.ai is redefining the way companies interact with consumers by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning—and a performance-based pricing model—to deliver customer acquisition products and customer engagement products.

Over a series of four posts, we’ll explore companies that are embracing the emerging performance economy. Aligned incentives and transparency of metrics are key to performance-based pricing that fuels this new trend. Technology and software are allowing business leaders to share both upside and downside risk with their partners, customers, and vendors.

SaaStr Annual 2019 was a little Burning Man, a little United Nations, and a lot of great ideas and sessions to help scale your business. Our team enjoyed networking, learning, and evangelizing how billing and revenue recognition can become a source of joy for businesses (not a hodgepodge of manual processes and disparate systems).

One of the hardest things to do when building a business is choose where best to spend your time. At Klara, we are focusing our time on revolutionizing communication for everyone involved in the patient’s journey. We do that because we live in a time where we have access to anyone and anything with a click of a button. Yet when it is about getting access to my doctor and their team or my medical data, it feels like I have to travel back in time and spend hours to get a simple answer. Klara is changing that reality, and that change requires our utmost focus.

Swing by Ordway booth #425 and learn more about how 2019 can be a year of adopting a billing process you don’t dread.

WASHINGTON, DC — January 15, 2019—  Ordway today announced that the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform was named a finalist in the 2018-2019 Cloud Awards Best Payment, Finance or Billing Solution category. The platform is now automating billing and revenue recognition for a diverse set of companies across the world in healthcare, real estate, logistics, retail, technology, finance, non-profit, performance management, and media industries.

The Cloud Awards program celebrates success and innovation in the cloud computing industry. The organization annually recognizes companies of all sizes from around the world.

“We see being named a Cloud Awards finalist as a testament to the quality of our team and platform. It is also a tribute to the fact we are solving real issues for our customers,” said Sameer Gulati, CEO of Ordway. “It’s always nice to be recognized by peers and the Cloud Awards follow Ordway being named part of the DC’s 50 on Fire and a DC Red Hot Company.”

"Our business experienced tremendous growth and change during 2018,” said Shirish Verma CFO at Play Octopus | Spotluck. “The Ordway platform was flexible and powerful enough to seamlessly handle the complexity of our evolving operations. It gives us peace of mind about billing so we can focus the lion's share of effort on scaling our business."

Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said, “Each entrant was worthy of a place on the shortlist, so making this cut signifies considerable focus on innovation and success. This year, the judges have had a more difficult time than ever in deciding which entrants should move forward to the next stage, and every submission displayed unique points of merit.”

About Ordway
Ordway is redefining how growing businesses approach billing and finance operations via its billing and revenue automation platform. Built by a team that helped design much of world’s cloud-based financial billing and ERP systems, Ordway modernizes the end-to-end billing process and eliminates the need for error-prone spreadsheets, manual accuracy checks during the monthly close process to ensure compliance to GAAP & IFRS, and time-consuming invoicing. Designed with the flexibility that today’s customers demand, and optimized to guide organizations during their growth phase, Ordway smartly manages a business’ most complex customers. Explore the platform at http://www.ordwaylabs.com.

Dive in to highlights from Sameer Gulati’s presentation at the recent FiNext conference. As Founder and CEO of Ordway, he shared his thoughts on the emerging performance economy and how smart automation can unleash company growth.