Stride, A Bootstrapped CRM Service, Acquired By The Founders of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg

Stride, a bootstrapped CRM company out of Seattle, has been sold to Neil Patel and Hiten Shah, the longtime investor partners behind KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The company, which targets freelancers and small businesses, is designed a bit differently than a CRM platform like Salesforce.com. Instead of managing contacts, its architecture is built to help small companies manage their deal flow, the opportunities that have value tied to them – rather than simply managing a database of contacts, said Andrew Dumont, one of the creators of the service in an email interview. Each deal has a contact assigned to it, but contact management, in a traditional sense, isn’t the purpose of the product.

“Currently CRM companies are focusing on building tools for sales teams, but yet we feel you don’t have to have a sales team to use a CRM tool,” Patel told TechCrunch. “That’s where we see an opportunity. For example, marketers and customer support can be using a CRM to help manage the customer lifecycle. Stride is a great tool for companies who are doing sales, but don’t have a sales team. For example, Crazy Egg doesn’t have a sales team, but yet we still use a CRM because we have customers and we need to manage our relationship with them. Our goal with Stride is to provide people with a CRM tool who can’t afford Salesforce nor do they need all of the features that Salesforce has to offer.”

More emphasis will go into marketing the Stride service and making it easier to use, Patel said.

The idea for Stride came from Nathan Carnes, according to a blog post written last year by TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez. It was built by Dumont, Adrian Pike, and Amiel Martin who decidedly did not want to develop a service for the salesperson who needs in-depth complex reports.

They also wanted the service to be simple to use. It is an alternative to a service such as Salesforce.com which is known for its complex user interface. Dumont calls Stride a consumerized version of sales tracking

Stride has a little over 300 customers including HootSuite and Intercom, and about 1,300 active users. It has a number of small design and creative agencies like 47deg and Design Commission that use it for new client prospecting. Pricing is $19 – $79 per month.

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