Patrick Henley.
Patrick Henley.

Spending 18 months traveling to hundreds of furniture trade shows and interviewing more than 2,500 people turned out to be a pretty smart decision for Patrick Henley.

Henley is the CEO and co-founder of Amptab, a Seattle-based startup that just raised more than $700,000 from angel investors to help fuel its line of software that helps furniture suppliers and manufacturers increase sales.

Amptab, which employs eight and will use the fresh funds to help build out its team, is a one-stop shop designed to help clients keep all their business data in one place — from product info to order history — and easily create apps, websites, catalogs, email campaigns and more with the information.

“We help our customers buy and sell no matter where they are in the supply chain,” Henley said.

amp12Henley’s original business model for Amptab was to simply eliminate paper for furniture manufacturers and build them digital catalogs. To validate this idea, he spent a year-and-a-half conducting those interviews at furniture markets — “trade shows on crack,” Henley calls them.

But along the way, another pain point presented itself.

“I realized that the problem wasn’t paper,” Henley said. “It was fragmentation of software. The pains these companies go through to organize their data, keep it organized, and then distribute it — that’s what we’re targeting now.”

That pivot turned out to be a good decision for two-year-old Amptab, which now has more than 100 customers. The company is also seeing impressive traction as of late — Henley, who co-founded Amptab with Denis Altudov, calls it “hockey stick trajectory.”

“The amount of sales we’ve closed in the last 90 days are more than we’ve closed in the entire history of the company,” he said. “We’re also covering our burn with monthly recurring revenue and we’re pretty excited about that.”

Henley said that Amptab, a graduate of Seattle-based B2B accelerator 9MileLabs, faces competition with each product it offers but noted that “no one does it all together.” He added that as far as a business model, his company’s closest competitor is Amazon or Alibaba.

“We won’t be Amazon Fresh, but the core of Amazon — the way they collect data and distribute it through a marketplace — that’s what we do, but we take a different approach of making it very approachable,” Henley said.

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