Back in 2002, we had a vision to create an agile and adaptable platform to help our clients grow. Fast forward fifteen years in business – 2017 marks a major milestone for Rev.io’s usage-based billing platform, and we have no plans of slowing down. Thanks to our strong team, inspiring clients and dedicated partners, this has been an incredible journey. We’ve learned a lot, made a few mistakes, built an amazing team along the way and helped our clients soar to new heights.
Before we move full steam ahead into our future, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past. What better way to recap the last fifteen years in business and the lessons we’ve learned than by chatting with the people who were there all along?
Q&A Session With 3 Rev.io OGs
Name: Ross Overstreet
Title: Founder, CTO
Years at Rev.io: 15
Name: Evan Rice
Title: VP of Sales & Marketing
Years at Rev.io: 5
Name: Alan Sellers
Title: Software Engineer
Years at Rev.io: 13
Q: What have been the biggest lessons learned in scaling up?
“As you scale, you have to take extreme care of the people that you hire or you risk eroding the culture that made you great enough to scale in the first place.”
– Evan Rice
Ross: That this company is only as great as its people. Hiring the best people is what makes any company successful. We try to be completely transparent with our team to help them feel empowered and important, because they are! We also try to keep our employees happy – it’s an initiative that we’re constantly working on and improving.
Q: You’ve built a powerful platform that’s leading in the industry. How did you determine what features your customers needed most?
Evan: We leverage feedback from our clients through multiple methods: on-going client business reviews, meetings at industry events, Rev.io’s Annual Summit, and through our electronic forum Rev.io ideas. We also stay on top of industry trends and choose one to three larger strategic items every six months to develop as Strategic Roadmap releases to help keep our clients out in front of the industry.
Q: What are some lessons you’ve learned through the hiring process?
Evan: The pressure to gain capacity by filling an open position can be massive and it can lead to unconsciously compromising your standards. I typically like to ask two other Rev.io employees to conduct short interviews with the candidates. That second or third opinion from other employees (who don’t have the same pressure to fill a position) helps confirm that the candidate will be a good fit for the company.
Ross: I like to ask everyone the same basic questions so I can later compare answers to standardize the interviewing process. I like to evaluate people on values and their specific skills and objectives. Spending part of the interview asking value-based questions (as opposed to just skill-based questions) is crucial for us. This helps determine if the candidate would truly fit in here. The ideal candidate profile has changed over time. As Rev.io grows, we’ve had to evolve our interview process to keep up with the growth of our company.
Q: What do you feel has been the biggest milestone since launch?
“The move to Atlanta and Brent joining the Team as CEO. The last four years have been incredibly fun and we’ve improved so much. For the first 10 years, we dedicated almost all of our time to developing the software itself. Every year gets better now because we’re growing and changing and learning.”
– Ross Overstreet
Evan: There have been many milestones, but the one that stands out is hitting five million in annualized recurring revenue.
Alan: Probably moving out of the POTS Communication segment. Communications in general was expanding (VoIP, wireless, etc), so we decided to generalize the platform. Now, we have lots of different clients using our recurring billing platform. Another major milestone was the transition to having clients come to the office to do in-person training. Before that, we did one-on-one training with clients over the phone. It was exciting to see multiple clients come into our office each monthly for a session. That’s when it really occurred to me that we were growing quickly.
Q: How do you stay relevant in an industry that can sometimes seem outdated?
Evan: The industry we are in isn’t outdated. Cloud, IoT, SDN…these are all at the heart of our core industry. We align ourselves with innovative companies. The ones that are committed to the outdated version of our industry simply won’t survive.
“Well, we rebranded this year. That’s been a huge change and helped us better reflect our values as a company. The name ‘Rev.io’ is perfect because it notates that we’re a computerized software that’s helping companies with their revenues.”
– Alan Sellers
Q: How has Rev.io’s purpose shifted over the years?
Evan: The mission has stayed the same – to be the best billing and back-office software company and the world by providing innovative solutions and extraordinary service to our clients and end users. The software, our team, our location, our goals, and our approach have all changed over the years, but our purpose remains consistent.
Q: You just rebranded, launched a new website, and celebrated 15 years in business. What’s next for Rev.io?
Evan: We are focused on continuing to empower our clients and employees, and evolving our approach and service offering. We are pursuing this through initiatives like our newly founded Operational Leadership and soon-to-be-released RESTful API. This is going to allow us to be even more effective as we continue to scale.
Alan: Diving deeper into the exploration of the new IoT space and further developing our API to bring more integration capabilities.
Ross: Create the next generation of products for our current and future clients. We’ll also strive to continue at this increased, productive pace. I want to stay at this stride and continue to improve how we’re serving, finding, and onboarding clients so that we’re always ahead of the curve.
Want more behind-the-scenes insights with Rev.io? Meet Rev.io and learn more about our journey today!