团队协作：Cork 的 SaaS 公司靠口碑运营 14 年，然后首次融资 7000 万美元

做的是什么生意

Teamwork sells project-management SaaS for client-services firms — agencies and consultancies that bill by project — with CRM, invoicing and knowledge-base add-ons.

启动资金：Self-funded from web-agency earnings; the boldest spend was €500,000 (~$675,000) on the Teamwork.com domain in 2013, most of the €530,000 the company had in the bank

起因

College classmates Peter Coppinger and Daniel Mackey ran a Cork web-design consultancy from the late 1990s. When their own projects outgrew whiteboards they built a custom task-management system in evenings and weekends, pivoted to product in 2007, and from 2011 concentrated fully on it.

经过

Teamwork grew without a single salesperson: business arrived through referrals and recommendations, which Coppinger said would have been impossible if investors had demanded a sales machine. Revenue climbed to $25M a year by early 2019 with 25%+ annual growth, helped by a Disney contract that prompted its first sales hire, and by 2021 the platform served 20,000+ teams in 170 countries.

结果

After 14 years of bootstrapping, Teamwork announced its first-ever external funding in July 2021: $70M from growth firm Bregal Milestone to accelerate expansion toward becoming the leading project-management SaaS for client-services companies.

可借鉴之处

一家公司可以通过口碑和利润为自己的缓慢增长提供资金，而正是因为没有投资人、只有客户这种自律，才让最终的融资按创始人的条件发生。