Bastin Gerald and the space between getting software and getting somewhere

A small business can be small in almost every respect except the number of things it has to do. It still needs to find customers, manage projects, pay attention to inventory and send invoices. The invoice, especially, has little sympathy for the size of the organization. Bastin Gerald built Apptivo around that awkward fact: a modest company can require a surprisingly complete set of business tools.

He arrived at the problem from the expensive end of the software industry. His career had taken him through Oracle and CashEdge, where business applications served organizations with resources far beyond those of a fledgling enterprise. Apptivo brought a different audience into view. The question became how much of that operational capability could be made accessible to a smaller business.

His subsequent venture, Profit.co, puts another question beside it. Once people have their tools, how do they agree on what they are trying to accomplish? Viewed together, the companies trace a career spent attending to the distance between having a system and making useful progress with it.

The enterprise apprenticeship

Gerald trained as a mechanical engineer before working on enterprise resource planning projects in the 1990s. Later came an MBA from Wharton. His path into technology ran through business processes: the sequences of decisions, records and handoffs that determine whether a company gets something done.

His author biography describes an early assignment at the TVS Group in Chennai involving warranty settlements. He says the work reduced the lead time from 210 days to seven. That is a particular kind of achievement. A customer waiting for a settlement has a rather direct way of appreciating process improvement: the waiting ends sooner.

In 1998, he moved to the United States and joined Oracle. His work included enterprise implementations, product strategy and relationships with consulting partners. He also coauthored a book about Oracle manufacturing and supply chain applications. Writing a manual about how organizations move goods and information is an unusually literal preparation for a career spent thinking about the same problem.

Apptivo’s account of his background records eight years at Oracle and five at CashEdge. At the latter, he worked on applications used by major banks and brokerage firms. His Startup Grind biography also credits him with helping establish architecture and infrastructure functions. These were jobs close to the structural parts of software, where an attractive interface has to rest on something dependable.

A smaller business deserves a complete toolbox

By May 2011, Gerald was publicly explaining Apptivo as a collection of applications covering customers, employees, projects, timesheets, invoices and online stores. His stated ambition was to bring the cost of ownership close to zero. At that point, the core applications were offered free, with revenue coming from additional services and website work.

The early pitch met skepticism. He recalled discussing it with friends and a venture capitalist who considered it very difficult to achieve. Gerald researched technologies and hired engineers in India. His description of the next step was admirably free of ceremony.

“So, then I set out to build it myself.”Bastin Gerald, 2011

The commercial problem was concrete. Apptivo was competing across several categories at once, with different established vendors in customer management, invoicing and project management. Its proposition depended on assembling enough of the business in one place to make that breadth useful. A collection of applications has to earn the word “integrated.”

By his 2017 Startup Grind appearance in Fremont, Apptivo’s stated scope included CRM, projects, supply chain, human resources and financial applications. The event biography reported 175,000 customers and noted PC Magazine Editors’ Choice recognition in 2015 and 2016. Those were milestones for the product Gerald had set out to build, rather than a reason to retire the original problem.

The work between the apps

The details of Apptivo’s partnerships offer a useful view of what Gerald’s ambition required in practice. In October 2019, the company announced an integration partnership with API Nation. The first connection was designed to synchronize Apptivo with QuickBooks Online and Desktop, reducing manual importing, exporting and repeated data entry.

Gerald tied the announcement to the needs of growing customers: better collaboration, fewer errors and more attention available for the business. It is a less theatrical form of entrepreneurship than unveiling a new category. It is also easy to understand if you have ever typed the same information into two systems and wondered which version would eventually betray you.

Earlier that year, Apptivo described using Nexmo’s contact center technology to bring voice and messaging capabilities into its platform. Gerald wanted smaller companies to have functions such as interactive voice response. The purpose included giving customers an experience associated with a more established business.

He also spoke appreciatively about the practical help received from Nexmo and Vonage: explanations, estimates and guidance about potential implementation problems. The account makes room for another company’s expertise. Building a suite of business applications still involves deciding which pieces to make, which to connect and whom to trust for the connection.

These are ordinary business inconveniences with considerable staying power. They explain why integration appears so often in Gerald’s story. A tool may do its own job perfectly while leaving a person to do the work between tools.

The spreadsheet goes for a walk

Profit.co grew from Gerald’s interest in the gap between strategy and execution. He recalled discussing spreadsheet-based goal tracking with friends during a trek in 2018. A minimum viable product followed in two months, with a launch in New York.

The initial reception disappointed him. A friend with enterprise software experience offered detailed criticism of the user experience. Gerald took notes, then spent five hours of the return flight to San Francisco working through a redesign. He said the revised product launched four weeks later. The useful part of the anecdote is the sequence: criticism became design work before it could become a permanent grievance.

In a separate interview, Gerald connected the idea to his own experience managing geographically distributed teams across time zones. He had worked with Hoshin Kanri, a strategy deployment method, and wanted software that represented objectives and key results clearly.

His concern was that existing tools carried assumptions inherited from task management or talent management. Those starting points made the goal-setting approach harder to express. Designing Profit.co therefore involved translating a management method into something people could understand and use without losing its purpose along the way.

That is a familiar problem for someone whose work has crossed engineering and management. A framework can be tidy on paper and troublesome in daily use. The interface becomes one of the places where those two versions of the idea have to meet.

Capital, customers and a wider map

In January 2023, Profit.co announced $11 million in external funding after about four years of bootstrapping. The financing included $9 million in equity from Elevation Capital and the remainder in debt from US banks. The round had closed in August 2022. The distinction matters: a funding headline can compress several different financial arrangements into one satisfying number.

The company said the capital would support sales and customer success. At the time, it had about 1,300 clients across sectors including manufacturing, financial services, retail, technology and government. Gerald described a revenue base spread across the United States, India, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the rest of Asia Pacific.

In August 2023, Profit.co announced a strategic partnership with Seed Group, part of the Private Office of Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum. The plan was to help it reach organizations in the UAE and the wider region, with guidance and introductions to decision-makers in public and private sectors.

For Gerald, this was a move into another market with the same underlying ambition: helping organizations improve performance through goals, assessment and coordinated work. The partnership also acknowledged something software founders eventually encounter. Access to a market involves people, local knowledge and relationships as well as a product that can be opened in a browser.

A business with somewhere to go

Profit.co’s current account of its mission emphasizes helping people concentrate on useful priorities and follow through on promises. Its platform has expanded beyond its original OKR focus into a broader set of strategy and management capabilities. Apptivo’s leadership page continues to describe Gerald’s commitment to affordable, usable software for smaller businesses.

The continuity is more interesting than a neat succession of job titles. An Oracle application, a small company’s invoice and a team’s quarterly objective each belong to a different setting. All involve getting people and information to the point where a decision can become an action.

Gerald’s career keeps returning to that point. It is a patient subject for a software entrepreneur: the meeting ends, the plan exists, and somebody has to make the next thing happen. A business can purchase quite a lot of software before it discovers how much depends on that last part.