Sramana Mitra: I presume you guys started the company with your own money? Robert Moore: We did. It was not a lot of money. It was about $10,000 in total between the two of us. Sramana Mitra: Who built the software? Who wrote the code? Robert Moore: I wrote the original version in my attic.
Sramana Mitra: There is a company that we have done a case study on in Utah called Steals.com that’s in the baby product category and that does one deal a day. Jeremy Young: Exactly. This was before any of those companies existed. We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now. Sramana Mitra: When you
Nick Hedges: At the same time, the current CEO was facing unfortunate circumstances. Two weeks after he joined the company, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He spent two years as the CEO of Velocity, or Leads360 as it was called then. All the time, he and I knew that he was not going to
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. True to the 1M/1M mantra, here is yet another story of a high-growth SaaS company that was bootstrapped first, and then has gone on to raise $22 million. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were
Jeremy Young: The second company was called Uberplay. That was a company that was going to take the best games out of Europe and trying to get the license for English-speaking markets, produce these games in China or Europe, and distribute them in the United States. We went over there and signed a lot of
Sramana Mitra: What triggered the telephony piece? What is the telephony functionality from a use case point of view? Nick Hedges: It does a large number of things. One of the things is that it allows you to work very efficiently through an optimized list. If you look at what a typical salesperson does in
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