Why you must build a moat around early customers

Benchling's success didn't come overnight. Some ten years after its founding, the company is worth more than $6 billion, and the founder sees the company going public in the future. The company's future looks like its past: talking to customers and building for power users.

Benchling's CEO and co-founder, Sajith Wickramasekara, recently spoke at a TechCrunch Live event along with one of its early investors, Miles Grimshaw, general partner at Benchmark. Together, the two explained Benchling's early strategy that tapped a small entry market, which eventually led to widespread adoption.

As Wickramasekara explained, early funding was hard to secure. It was 2012, and Benchling sat alone between SaaS companies and biotech. "Every software investor thought what we were doing was small and unimportant," Wickramasekara said, adding later, "and then we went to science investors, and every science investor understood the challenges of R&D, but they didn't understand software; they invested in drugs."

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