How One SaaS Startup Achieved Profitability in 2 Years

Tettra was running out of money. After failing to raise seed funding in the summer of 2017, its cofounders decided to chase a more ambitious goal–profitability.

John Bonini on February 27, 2018 (last modified on September 19, 2021) • 1 minute read

Andy Cook, cofounder of Tettra, was having trouble raising money.

The company that he and his childhood friend, Nelson Joyce, had founded was running out of money, so they figured they’d go the same route as every other software company and raise a seed round.

“At some point after we’d been trying for three months and had no good leads, we were like, ‘we’re not going to be able to close this round, it’s just not going to happen. What do we do?” remembers Cook. “We needed to get to profitability because that was the only way to survive.”

Tettra isn’t every other software company.

For starters, its founders met in 7th grade. Okay, so while that has little bearing on the product itself, they build, market, and sell like neighbors–humanly. Pragmatically.

This makes the song and dance of fundraising a little unnatural for both of them.

Tettra is built on the premise of making collaboration, and knowledge sharing, easier. Naturally, Cook and Joyce are passionate about the potential of the company, so rather than chase funding, they decided to chase a much more ambitious goal–profitability.

This is their story, and I decided to start it off not at the point of going to market, or the prototype, but something much more interesting–their friendship.

Subscribe to Metrics & Chill (formerly Ground Up) and get notified when new episodes go live

How One SaaS Startup Achieved Profitability in 2 Years

Andy Cook, cofounder of Tettra, was having trouble raising money.

The 4 Principles G2’s CMO Used to Grow Monthly Organic Visitors from 500k to 5 Million

Rapid growth is hard—consistent rapid growth at scale is even more of a challenge. Here, Ryan Bonnici explains the 4 principles that helped G2 10X organic visitors.

The 3-Step Approach HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Uses to Set Goals for Continuous Growth

HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Kieran Flanagan, recently shared the key learnings that helped HubSpot instill a culture of growth throughout the entire company.

Vimeo’s Journey to Full-Service SaaS & One Million Paying Subscribers

On this episode of Ground Up, Vimeo’s Melissa Matlins dives deep into Vimeo’s journey to become a full-service video platform and how they’re repositioning the brand to support that.