Meet the Australian taking on MSP software’s big guns

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Australian MSPs build their own software tools, but fewer commercialise them. 

Gorelo founder Mikel Wellsmore is one who has, and he's ambitious about his platform, seeing it as a competitor to the likes of SuperOps, Syncro, Atera, HaloPSA and NinjaOne.

Five years since development started and a little over a year after its official launch, Gorelo – designed to handle service delivery (PSA), remote management (RMM), documentation, automation, billing and integrations – has welcomed external investment from an unnamed Australian MSP and is nearing 300 customers across Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

“Gorelo was completely bootstrapped from day one – we funded the build and early growth entirely ourselves. That changed just in the last few months,” Wellsmore told techpartner.news.

“Demand for Gorelo, and for specific features MSPs were asking us to build, grew faster than we could keep up with on our own. Taking on a few backers from Australia, including an established MSP, was the only way to move at the pace the market demanded.”

Wesllmore said that the US-registered company's biggest challenge right now is getting their name out there.

"Every dollar has gone into product and we've relied on word-of-mouth to grow. Plenty of MSPs who'd be a great fit simply don't know we exist yet,” he explained.

“That's why we've started building out sales and marketing now, purely to assist our product-led strategy. We'll keep overinvesting in product, because that's where we think we win (and where many established players are stagnant). We'd rather win on the strength of the product than outspend anyone on marketing.”

“No silver bullet”

Before launching Gorelo, Wellsmore was running Elevate Technology, the Brisbane-headquartered MSP he founded in Mackay in Queensland 15 years ago, using “about 15 tools all bolted together” which he said meant constant problems with integrations, support, performance and functionality.

“Most of my technicians, instead of using ConnectWise Manage, would go into Slack and have conversations there, or go into Outlook and send emails directly from there - these frustrations led me to look at ‘was there any other platform that fits an MSP top to bottom, all in one?’. It turns out there wasn't. There was no silver bullet, no perfect platform,” he claimed.

“I came across [Gorelo co-founder] Huzaif Abdul-Sattar, who runs his own MSP in the US, and he had experience building internal applications and applications for his clients, so we put our heads together.”

Although Wellsmore has since transitioned out of Elevate's daily operations to focus full-time on Gorelo as CEO, while serving as Elevate's strategic advisor, the MSP serves as Gorelo’s ‘innovation lab’, meaning every Gorelo feature is tested in a live MSP before it reaches the market.

“Heaps of MSPs are building internal tooling these days -- scripts, dashboards, ticket automations, little apps to patch over what the big vendors don't do well - [but] what's rare is taking it all the way to a commercial, standalone PSA/RMM platform that other MSPs want to use,” he said.

“A few have come before us and I'm sure we won't be the last.”

Keeping context together

Wellsmore said Gorelo works best when utilised by MSPs with roughly three to 10 technicians, owing to his belief that while one-man bands can “get away with a lot of bad habits ... by the time you have three or four technicians, that's all gone”.

“[By then], you are running your business properly - that means you're doing billing, you're automating, you've got proper ticket queues and flows, you're hopefully documenting fixes and things like that,” he told techpartner.news.

“When [MSPs] get to about three or four [technicians], they start using our entire platform, especially all the collaborative style features. Instead of having [conversations] in Teams or Slack, you actually have it in Gorelo on the ticket. There's ‘at’ mentions for individuals and groups, there's native notifications in Windows, iOS, Android, and it just keeps all that context together.

“When you go back and look at a ticket from a year ago, every conversation is there, whether it's the main conversation with the end user or maybe a third-party conversation with Dell support [for example]. You also have private internal comments and approval flows, all there on the single ticket. You don't have to bounce around through multiple tools and say, ‘Hey, where did that conversation happen? I have no idea’.”

Australia an “under-served” market

Gorelo is also planning to bring AUD billing to customers, alongside local data residency via an Australian data centre, by the end of June; all the company’s infrastructure is currently located on Azure’s West US 2 region in Seattle. 

Wellsmore claimed this 'data localisation' would be “a big differentiator”.

“You don't really get that from any of the other all-in-one platforms like Syncro, Atera, SuperOps; you're stuck in the US or Europe, so that gives us one more benefit over them and puts us in the same league [with] HaloPSA and NinjaOne, where they do have Australian data residency,” he said.

“It’s a market that is definitely under-served; often, Australia is the last to get localised infrastructure, localised billing, localised integrations. Generally, these companies focus on the US and then UK, and then sometimes just Europe in general, and maybe eventually we get something in Australia, so I'm looking to do it in reverse.

The company has been hiring, including US-based Kyle Menosky and Australia-based Yunus Celik, who both joined last week as head of sales and head of marketing respectively.

Getting to this point was “extremely difficult” and “pretty damn expensive”, Wellsmore admitted.

“It’s pretty wild to try and build an all-in-one platform – PSA, RMM, documentation, project management - nearly simultaneously,” he said.

Convincing MSPs to use the platform was also particularly hard at first, he said, when Gorelo’s RMM wasn’t yet built and when the company hadn’t yet earned MSPs’ trust.

“It was just a matter of time. We had to stick around.”