Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Kenneth Loi, co-founder and developer for Vancouver’s Procurify, a cloud-based spend management platform, describes how he and his co-workers approached their idol, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank TV series star, and got funding for their cloud-based procurement product.
“We asked ourselves, ‘Hmm, if there’s one person that we want in our company as an adviser, who would it be?’ and all of us in the company at that time thought Mark Cuban would be someone that would be cool to have. He’s very smart, he’s been very successful and we want someone to sort of mentor for us.
“Then one of our key employees said, ‘You know what? We all read the book and his email address is right there. Why don’t we email him and see what happens?’
“We sent him an email from an address on the back of his book. We were very shocked: he actually replied back to us, and he said, ‘You know what? You guys have a very interesting product. Right now I want to see more of your numbers, and I want to see where you are at in a month.’
“At that time, we were very anxious so we quickly put together a business model. Of course, being a startup, everything is hacked together at the last minute. We put together a forecast of what we would do if he invested in the company with his money and how we would gain traction with that money and how to basically grow Procurify from there.
“He liked the business proposition. There was a lot of back and forth during that time after that second email, because in the second email, he basically said, ‘I really like your product, I like what you are doing. Let me get you in contact with one of my consultants and get her to take a look at your product more closely and do some more investigation at that point.’
“We sent [him and his consultant] a demonstration of Procurify. They looked at the product very thoroughly, and they realized that it was something that even Mark Cuban himself needed.
“Our product does automated approvals, and it tracks all the spending that’s happening in a company, no matter how big or small.
“How Mr. Cuban currently does his approvals is he does it all by email, so it’s very difficult for him to even track his orders. So he thought that this was something that even he himself could use.
“From that point on, it was just putting together some numbers and some back-and-forth emails. We had probably sent a total of close to 400 emails between us and Mark Cuban and his consultants, just talking about the product, clients, numbers.
“It wasn’t until recently that we were able to close the deal. At this point, we are pretty much close to closing about half a million dollars in a seed round, including his investment.
“With that money we are refining our product and growing a bigger team.
“We will then be able to pursue what we always wanted to do, which is to really grow the company and move to our next stage, which is to get ready for a Series A [financing].” •
