Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your involvement in that company and how long you were involved in that company. Jeremy Young: I was involved for probably a couple of years. I ended up selling my interest back to them. Sramana Mitra: In what capacity? Jeremy Young: I came to them with the idea. They
Sramana Mitra: There was nothing specific to the mortgage industry? It was pretty much a horizontal product that you apply to the mortgage industry and when you decided to diversify after the financial crisis, it translated reasonably easily into these other verticals? Nick Hedges: Exactly right. Sramana Mitra: You’re back to $4 million in revenue
Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of that partnership? Jeremy Young: Windows95.com was owned by Steve Jenkins. He was my partner in Virtual Servers. He pushed traffic from Windows95 to my company. He basically had advertisements for the web hosting product on his website. Sramana Mitra: How big did the company grow to be? Jeremy
Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Nick Hedges: I joined the company because I was really interested in the data that they were collecting and the flexibility of the platform that they had built. Essentially, they were collecting closed-loop data so these are data from the point that the lead was created to the point that they converted
Jeremy Young: I was teaching HTML at the university at that time. There was a guy in my class, Steve Jenkins, who registered the domain name windows95.com before Microsoft was even thinking about the Internet. If you remember, Windows didn’t even have the web browser in their launch edition of Windows 95. He was building a website
Nick Hedges: The company was founded by Jeff Solomon who was running a software development company in Los Angeles. He had several clients who were in the mortgage industry, and they were asking him for a system that allowed them to be more efficient on how they manage the leads that they were purchasing from companies. He
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a wonderful story of a serial bootstrapper who has built a wonderful e-commerce business similar to Groupon, but with no outside money. Sramana Mitra: Let’s got back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and
Sramana Mitra: How did eteatrade go? Nick Hedges: It went well. We ended up transacting about $2 million a month. The net margins were pretty small. Ultimately, we sold it into one of Nick’s businesses that ran his tea and coffee estates. I didn’t want to be a part of a bigger entity, so I