Sramana Mitra: What marketing channels were producing for you? Peter Coppinger: The referral was a nice slow burner that cost us nothing. We did affiliates. We did Google ads. It works,but there’s a point of saturation. It probably worked better years ago. Sramana Mitra: It’s expensive now. Peter Coppinger: The only one making money is
Sramana Mitra: Was there a section of the website where you had a lot of descriptions and keywords that Google organic was picking up. Peter Coppinger: Nothing intentional. Today, Google has changed it so that the people with the deepest pockets win. You could be listed on page two or three of Google and still
Sramana Mitra: What is the timeline? You started this in 1999 and grew this to 40 people in three to four years? Peter Coppinger: Yes. We got the idea for Teamwork in 2009. We launched around then, but we kept it as a side project. We really found it difficult to find time to work
Sramana Mitra: How long did just the two of your run the agency? Peter Coppinger: We grew the agency to about 40 people over the next few years. We had never ran a proper business and we had no idea what we were doing. How do you do pitches? How do you do pricing? How
Peter has led a terrific vertical cloud business from Ireland and now runs a global SaaS company that is kicking ass. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now? Todd Schwartz: This year, we’re in the over $400 million range. Sramana Mitra: When did you go public? Todd Schwartz: In 2021 on the NYSE. When I walked up to the stock exchange, it was never about financial gain. It’s so funny to me to see
Sramana Mitra: What about going beyond Illinois? How long did you do just Illinois? Todd Schwartz: We scale nationally now. What was interesting to me was there were 17 other states that had small-dollar lending laws that we could use. What’s difficult is that each state has its own rules. We started to scale that
Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that? Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and