Nimble Founder Ready to Hit the Gas

Serial entrepreneur Jon Ferrara describes the $1 million his company Nimble has raised from such high-profile investors as Mark Cuban and Google Ventures as more a reward than the building of his war chest.

His investors, announced Friday, are people he turned to for advice in building his company from the ground up since its founding two years ago, and he said he wanted to let those early advisers in on the action as he grows Nimble.

That growth, he says, is predicated on integrating contacts from e-mail, social networks like Twitter and Facebook into his company’s platform and combining those with tools for keeping in touch with internal teams to build and track relationships between small and medium businesses and their potential customers. The Nimble platform also allows companies and individuals to easily add new prospects and their social information into their databases.

“I did not want to take any money from anybody … until I was ready to put my foot on the gas,” Ferrara told Portfolio.com. And in 2012, that’s exactly what he plans to do.

After spending $2 million of his own money to build the technology behind Nimble and assemble a team for the Southern California company, he’s ready to raise real money. He’s looking for $6 million to $10 million in venture capital, and a valuation for his two-year-old company of about $30 million.

At the end of the month, he’s planning to launch a series of upgrades to the current service. And this year will see Nimble roll out apps for Apple and Google mobile devices.

Nimble has also now added a pay model to its preexisting free testing service. Users can sign up as individuals for free. But companies that want to integrate the service for use among their teams, the cost will be $15 per user—a freemium model that has become common for web-based software services catering to the business market. Previously, the company had largely spent time with users testing its technology.

Though Nimble is entering a tough market, filled with social tools for business like Jive, Yammer, and Salesforce.com—the granddaddy of customer relationship management (CRM) tools—Ferrara says he isn’t worried about building a viable business of his own.

"Some companies are trying to bring business applications to the web or leverage cloud infrastructure. Others add social or mobile features to existing applications as discrete capabilities," said Don Dodge, an angel investor who has put money into Nimble. "Nimble started fresh and took the best of CRM, social media, and cloud infrastructure, and built it into a powerful social business platform."

And Ferrara has been there and done that when it comes to building a CRM company.

“We all do what we do because we know what we know,” he said. And it just happens he knows a little something about both the sales process and the current state of technology.

Ferrara was a co-founder of GoldMine, one of the early runs at bringing sales management tools online.

He sold that company for about $100 million to FrontRange Partners in 1999. After that, Ferrara said he took time off to be a full-time dad. But he didn’t ignore the explosion of social media, and the new way people were communicating, and from the observation grew his latest effort.

Ferrara, a salesman before he helped build GoldMine, says he’s still trying to make the sales life easier for companies.

“The best products come from your own need,” he said. And now the need involves turning the flood of information in our social-media-driven world into sales.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com