Andrew Fox is the cofounder and chairman of ClubPlanet and the CEO of Track Entertainment. He has spent the past six years running entertainment and service companies. ClubPlanet is the largest and most comprehensive nightlife destination on the Internet and provides content, listings, tickets, and many other features for nightlife events in over 35 cities
SM: I like that your business is simple and elegant. RK: The roots of the business were very simple. The focus was on the end user experience. It was an easy service to use and the product was not cluttered. If you look at other collaboration services there are 80 services there, most of which
SM: What was your revenue like when you first raised money? RK: It was getting close to $1M. We were three people but we had a very bandwidth intensive service. We had a substantial infrastructure that we were building out.
SM: Do you work integrated deals with other major software vendors? RK: We have some, but the majority of the time users need to go install the YouSendIt plug-in on their own. We have done a little bit of both, and we would like to do more integrated solutions.
SM: What was the conversion ratio? RK: Over the past two years we have doubled our conversion rate on the free-to-paid subscription side to 4%. Overall, including our transactional pay-per-use which includes enterprise, the conversion rate is close to 10%.
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SM: I understand there were three cofounders. Did any of you take a salary role in the beginning of the company? RK: The other guys were still consulting at their previous jobs. I was out raising seed capital to keep the company going because my former company had just been purchased. I was able to
SM: What was the competitive landscape like at that point? RK: Right around the time we launched another small company out of Los Angeles called Dropload. It did not take off as quickly as hoped.