Thursday, January 2, 2020
Interview with Matt Danna, Co-founder and CEO, Boulevard
If you run a salon or spa, how do you tackle the challenges of scheduling and your point-of-sale? Los Angeles-based Boulevard (www.joinblvd.com) has develops business management software to help premium salons and spas with their operations. The company is lead by Matt Danna, who previously was at Fullscreen, and is backed by Index Ventures and Bonfire Ventures.
What is Boulevard?
Matt Danna: Boulevard is a platform-as-a-service that we built specifically to help power the next generation of salons and spas. It provides a comprehensive scheduling and point-of-sale system for those businesses.
How did you start the company?
Matt Danna: We started the company out of our own personal experience as end consumers and clients. I had met my co-founder, Sean, at Fullscreen, where he was also based here in LA, and one week in particular, his hair was a complete mess. I was teasing him, like a good colleague, and he told me he had kept on been forgetting to call the salon to make an appointment during the day, and then at night they were closed. As we were talking, I became very curious to why salons and spas are seemingly so far behind the times, compared to other offline businesses like restaurants. Those businesses have made the investments and thought around making themselves convenient to clients, and I still didn't understand why salons required you to make a call to make an appointment. I learned that the technology they use is pretty legacy. Those businesses deserve far better technology, so they can streamline their operations and improve the client experience.
What were you guys doing at Fullscreen?
Matt Danna: Sean was the VP of Engineering, and had joined Fullscreen as employee number three or four as an engineer, originally, before becoming VP of Engineering. I was at first a Product Manager, and decided to become VP of Product. We were helping YouTube creators understand their audience, make better content, and ultimately, grow their reach.
Why did you two decide to move from the content world to developing this new software?
Matt Danna: We though, and assumed, that someone had solved this problem, that someone had already built this technology for small businesses. So, we talked to a bunch of business owners, several hundred of them, over many weekends, and learned as much as we could about the market. We learned about how the technology was, and found that that most of them were using desktop, on-premise solutions, which were at least a couple of decades behind the state-of-the-art. They also have some very unique challenges, which haven't been ever addressed. We learned that, under the hood of those businesses, the way people are scheduled really matters. For them, time is money. One of the reasons they don't like to publish their schedule of clients, because scheduling efficiency can really kill the margins of these businesses. Talking to owners, they really needed technology that would help schedule clients in a way to drive yields, and create customer conveinence.
Aren't there other kinds of software available to do this online?
Matt Danna: Our market is extremely large. There are over 3 million businesses, collectively representing over 200 billion annually in spending. We don't think this is a winnter-takes-al market. Our solution is specifically built for the mid market and enterprise, for businesses doing significant volume, especially those running sophisticated operations who really put a premium on client experience. There are lots of other solutions for sole proprietors who own their own businesses, or freelancers, but we think we've found an underserved niche in the segment we're focused on today.
How are you funding your business?
Matt Danna: We bootstrapped it for the first couple of years. We basically liquidated our life's savings, our 401Ks, and put everything into the company. Once we had a prototype and proof-of-concept for our enterprise platform, we then asked friends and family to invest. We also brought in a couple of angels, and we also joined the Luma Launch accelerator, and after a year, we raised our seed round from Bonfire Ventures, which is based here in Los Angeles. They specialize in B2B and SaaS software, and they were very important as a local lead and as our first institutional investor. We were also pre-empted for a Series A round, which we just announced last month.
What's the biggest challenge for you as a startup?
Matt Danna: For us, it's trying to build an incredible brand, with top-of-the-market technology.It's been an incredible opportunity, and we've seen amazing progress. Building a technology company in LA does have its challenges, I'd saw we're getting lots of interest, but we've had some issues in terms of the talent pool on the technical side, although we've had success in importing and recruiting people to come and join us, but it's definitely one of the challenges. It's tough finding the types of individuals who have experience building B2B and enterprise software.
Finally, what should we be watching from your company over the next few months?
Matt Danna: You'll start to see some pretty interesting things in the future. Boulevard is built to be a platform, and we want to partner with other best-in-class businesses. I think the days of software companies building everything themselves and building huge monolithic applications are done. We are excited to invest in an ecosystem and partners around us, who can help serve these businesses in the best way. I think you'll also see a lot more, big-brand name accounts in the salon and spa business coming on board to Boulevard. If you look at the top three or for top-dollar salons and spas in Los Angeles, there's a high likelihood we're powering their operations, or will be soon. Nationwide, we've also started signing up customers, but there's definitely a high concentration of our customers here. People will start to see us more and more around town.
Thanks!