Sramana Mitra: How much was your total revenue line in 2009 when you had six employees? Steve Acree: In the neighborhood of $2.5 million to $3 million. Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major inflection point in the business after 2009? Steve Acree: It started to get cumbersome. It was three dashboards. You had to plug
Sramana Mitra: In 2007 when you introduced this new channel, how much did Amazon do? Steve Acree: Amazon, at the get-go, didn’t do a whole lot. In the first month, it sold about 10 items. By the six-month mark, it was doing about $10,000 a month in sales. After about 12 months, it was doing about
Sramana Mitra: What really clicked in gear in 2003? If you look 12 years back when you decided that this was where you’re going to spend your time, what clicked in gear? Steve Acree: Just the idea that everybody is moving to the Internet. They’re interested in eBay and Amazon. I had really good success
E-commerce companies are relatively easy to bootstrap. Steve tells the story of his journey bootstrapping Seismic Audio to almost $10 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Steve Acree: I was born
Sramana Mitra: How is the customer base distributed? Are we talking Asian customers? How have you built the sales channel? Dave Peters: We’ve got 13 telco customers across Australia, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. All of them are paying for recurring software fees and also for our managed marketing operations team. We have teams on
Sramana Mitra: Was this the first funding? Dave Peters: That’s right. Sramana Mitra: What happened after you got that first funding? What were the next major milestones or accomplishments? Dave Peters: Based on that, we built up the team and started to develop the product further. We started to push the sales and marketing team. We
Sramana Mitra: 1998 was when you started. How long from then did the sale happen? Dave Peters: I think it’s about 2000. Sramana Mitra: A couple of years later. Dave Peters: Yes. I was consulting the first year or so. Then, we started selling it. Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging for the product?
Sramana Mitra: Did you spec out the software that you were going to build? Dave Peters: The way it worked was when I was in Paris, we built a custom-built software. I had actually licensed that software on an exclusive 15-year deal with that telco when I left. Because I didn’t have any capital, I