#AccessAlberta Original Stories: Jobber CEO Sam Pillar

In our #AccessAlberta Original Stories series, we chatted with Sam Pillar, CEO & Co-founder of Jobber, about how he built up his vision for the business over the last decade; his advice for business leaders of growing tech companies, and his vision for the company over the next year.

Q. What is Jobber — and why did you start it?

Jobber is a business management platform for home service companies -- so very small businesses and industries like landscaping, residential cleaning, roofing, plumbing, arborists. They use our stuff to run their businesses on a day to day basis so all of their quote estimates, job scheduling, invoicing and billing, and all of their employees would have our app on their phones so they can sort of stay in touch with their back offices. We help our customers run very efficient companies and deliver really great services to their end customers. As a result they end up looking like much bigger businesses.

Q. What was the vision you had for it back in 2011 and has it changed?

We have not pivoted the company at all through our journey. When we first started the company, we were both freelance software developers and actually didn't know each other. We were working on our own sort of separate projects. I'd been working on some not-for-profit organizations and small businesses, and this really shined a light on the fact that there was no good software back then for small businesses. 

I started working on this idea and met my co-founder in a coffee shop. We were both going to the same coffee shop all the time and it was obvious that we were both software developers, and so we got to chatting one day and I told him about this idea I was working on. From day one we started building this business management system. 

In the early days it was only scheduling a job and invoicing for it, so it was just very basic. Over the years we took on more and more of that day to day workflow problem. Today, the product is much bigger and solves many other problems, but the principle and the vision for it is very much the same — making running these businesses as easy, efficient, and organized as possible. 

While the principle and the Northstar are still the same, we have a much larger vision for what the company can be and how much of that problem we can take on for our customers. 

Q. Did you set out to build a global company?

We started the company at an interesting time -- if you were starting a SaaS company you were kind of global by default. I remember when we had our first handful of customers, maybe 20 or 30 -- even at that point we had customers in all kinds of places, certainly in the U.S., but we had international customers as well. Our focus was on North America and that's still the case today, even though we have customers in 50 countries. 

I think that the moment where we realized we are really onto something was really more a function of the customer sentiment, and the degree to which our customers were relating to us, saying things like, “Oh my god, how did I live before having that? I can never think of having a business that runs on pen and paper again”. 

As a small business, whatever your definition of success is, Jobber can help you achieve it, and we saw that signal pretty early on, like in the first handful of customers. We had Product Market Fit in terms of sentiment and validation and knew it was something that customers really needed and were willing to pay for. 

I think we were very early in the technology adoption curve and we still are, so we were lucky in a lot of senses that we were in Edmonton and not in the middle of other tech echo chambers. I also think that the moment of “we're onto something” continues today. There's a Shopify-sized opportunity here, and I think over the last couple of years and going forward, we are really coming into our stride, to build that kind of a scale business.

Q. Talk a little bit about the landscape in Edmonton and what you're most excited about from the Alberta tech ecosystem today.

Back in 2011 Startup Edmonton was not a physical location but it existed insofar as it was doing lots of community building and I remember presenting at a demo camp at the UofA. It was one of my first experiences pitching or presenting about the company and the thing that we were working on to a room with a couple dozen people in it. 

Over the years it's matured a lot and Startup Edmonton has become much more of an institution. Back then there were a bunch of companies that were also raising a seed round and it was a really exciting period of time. 

Every once in a while I get contacted from somebody in the ecosystem or I'm having a conversation and I realize there's a lot of companies that I've never heard of before in Edmonton, which is really exciting. It's certainly come a long way since 2011.

Q. In 2019 Jobber was named “One of the best places in technology for millennials'' and you recently said in an interview that your core values were being “humble, supportive, and giving a shit”. What advice do you have for founders and CEOs to build that great culture and attract and retain talent?

The saying “There's no good or bad culture, there's strong and weak culture” from @Brian Chesky from @Airbnb is true.  It's really a function of how well you create alignment and what is the purpose of the company and the values you want to create. The social contract when people join Jobber seems to center around caring about our purpose and wanting to contribute towards it. I believe that the way our team collaborates in pursuit of our shared vision makes sense and feels good so people are naturally on board when they join Jobber. 

We don't have posters in the office or that sort of aspirational stuff, but every single person that's part of the company can tell you what our values are. 

Q. What can we expect to see from Jobber in 2021?

We're growing as fast as we structurally can. We plan on hiring 200 people in 2021, doubling the company over the course of 12 to 18 months, and I think that's about as fast as you can go — doubling is really hard. 

And we're doing that to lean into the market opportunity as hard as we possibly can. To my point earlier, we were very early in this technology adoption cycle for home services and that's still the case in this industry. This market is pre-chasm, for people who know the Crossing the Chasm model, and there are millions of businesses out there that we intend to get on board with Jobber over the years to come. It's a real “all hands on deck” situation to just make sure that we're getting the right foundation in place to be able to make the most of that opportunity while it's in front of us because it's happening in the next little while.

If you are interested in hearing more about scaling startups in Alberta, please feel free to contact us at jfedeyko@connectionsiliconvalley.com or subscribe to our AccessAlberta newsletter here.