Sramana: How much did you charge your first client? Mike Mothner: Our fee back then was $250 a month to manage her budget. Her budget was $1,000 a month.
Sramana: So you graduated from Dartmouth, turned down Goldman Sachs, and decided to focus on Wpromote. What was your next move? Mike Mothner: It was June of 2003, and I moved back to L.A. I had a good idea what I wanted to do to expand Wpromote. I was using PPC to drive an organic
Michael Mothner is the founder and CEO of search engine marketing firm Wpromote. The company has maintained over 2,700% growth from 2003 through 2007. Michael has a degree in economics and computer science from Dartmouth College. Sramana: Mike, what is your story leading up to Wpromote? Where are you from? Mike Mothner: I am 29
Sramana: In 2004, after you received inventory financing, were you still getting 80% to 90% of your business through pay-per-click marketing? Kim Pedersen: Yes. That is not true today, but at that time it was. Search engine marketing is key for us today. We take 99% of all sales orders on the Internet today. We
Sramana: Aside from improving your personal managerial skills, it also sounds like you were unaware of various technical capabilities that could have helped you with your business, like inventory management software. Were you aware those types of software programs existed? Kim Pedersen: The real problem for me was the challenge of purchasing additional inventory while
Sramana: Even though you had no formal metric tools, you must have had some sense of the impact these ads were having on your business. Kim Pedersen: That is a correct statement. I could tell by the number of sales orders I received each day because the number kept going up.
Sramana: How did you handle the e-commerce transactions when you first launched the website? Did you just generate leads that you would complete by visiting in person or over the phone? Kim Pederson: I would put listings of our inventory online, and visitors could print out a copy of our inventory list and mark the
Sramana: What was the first thing you did with the $5,000 you had in order to start your own business? Kim Pederson: I spent $3,200 of it on a computer. Even at that time, I don’t think my brain stem was connected to my cerebral cortex yet. It was a bad mistake but it worked