Outright, a company that offers simple web software to help small businesses manage their finances, has raised $2 million in a first round of venture funding.
Chief executive Kevin Reeth gave me a demo last July, back when the company was called Bootstrap, and I was impressed by the way he'd been "absolutely ruthless in simplifying and paring things down." Services include tracking sales and business expenses, organizing your business records for taxes, and reminding you to pay your estimated taxes on time. The Campbell, Calif. company is also making the data you upload to Outright available to other business tools via application programming interfaces (APIs), starting by integrating with FreshBooks to track your invoices.
Outright's software is free for now, but Reeth plans to start charging for a premium version.
The company isn't giving many specific numbers on user growth, but Reeth says customers have entered data about around $100 million in transactions so far. Meanwhile, Compete shows that traffic to the original GoBootstrap.com site made a huge jump in January. Reeth attributes the jump to the tax season, as well as the New Year spurring businesses to want to get their act together.
So why the name change? Reeth says one of the big problems was the fact that the company couldn't get the Bootstrap.com website (in fact, I mistakenly linked to that website in my first post). The other issue is that "bootstrap" is a well-known term in the tech community, but is a bit more obscure among the less tech-savvy businesses that the company targets.
The round was led by First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures, with participation from SoftTechVC and undisclosed angel investors. TechCrunch first reported the funding.
Competitors include NetBooks the online version of Intuit's QuickBooks.
