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Dean Stoecker in a 1962 Volkswagen microbus at Alteryx’s headquarters.
SRC’s first customer, a junk In 2006, as part of a pivot away from eight, nine or ten [new clients] a quar-
mail company in California, paid one-off consulting gigs, SRC released ter to north of 250,” he says.
$125,000 to better target its coupons. software to let customers do the num- Although data mining and data ana-
“We were building big-data analytic ber-crunching themselves. They named lytics is a long-established field, encom-
cloud solutions back in 1998,” says the software Alteryx, a nerdy joke for passing a slew of startups as well as gi-
Stoecker, when many businesses changing two variables simultaneously: ants like Oracle and IBM, “we see almost
were barely online and terms like “Alter Y, X.” Stoecker made Alteryx the no direct competition,” Stoecker insists.
“cloud computing” were years away. company name, too, in 2010. “It’s a pretty wide-open field,” says
SRC was profitable from the outset. The market was still small. To grow Marshall Senk, a senior research analyst
“We didn’t spend ahead of revenue. revenue, “we just kept raising the price at Compass Point Research & Trading.
We didn’t hire ahead of revenue,” of our platform,” Stoecker says. In the “The choice is you buy a suite from Al-
says Adams, sitting in a remodeled beginning, Alteryx sold its subscrip- teryx or you go buy 15 different prod-
1962 Volkswagen bus at Alteryx tion-based software for $7,500 per ucts and try to figure out how to get
them to work together.”
ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES of the company’s journey. “We never The next year, as Stoecker felt demand pauses in front of a timeline depicting
user; by 2013 it was charging $55,000.
headquarters, theoretically a symbol
Inside Alteryx’s offices, Stoecker
growing, he slashed prices to $4,000.
calculated burn rates. That was a big
topic in the whole dot-com era. We
his first 22 years in business. “The good
Volume made up for the lower rate.
were not running the business like a
stuff hasn’t even occurred yet,” he says.
Today Alteryx has 5,300 customers.
dot-com.”
“I’m going to need a way bigger wall.” F
“We immediately went from averaging
DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020 FORBES ASIA | 81
