If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. In 2018, Co-founder CEO Mitch Russo shared the story of how he built Timeslips and sold it to Sage for $10.5 million in 1994. Very entertaining as well as instructive. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Co-founder CEO Mitch Russo tells the story of how he built Timeslips and sold it to Sage for $10.5 million in 1994. Very entertaining as well as instructive. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you
CEO Mitch Russo tells the story of how he built TimeSlips and sold it to Sage. Very entertaining as well as instructive. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Mitch Russo: I was born in New York.
Mitch Russo: The dot-com bust then hit. It was April of 2000. The stock market started to do what it’s doing right now. It was just crazy. I realized what was happening. Our customers were going out of business. When the dust settled a year later, we had lost 30% of the furniture retailers. Another
Sramana Mitra: When did you leave Sage? Mitch Russo: 1998. Sramana Mitra: Then you came back to Boston. What happens next?
Mitch Russo: As I said, tech support was starting to run very long waits. A woman called and announced that she is the head of the legal technology division for the Los Angeles Bar Association. She was having terrible problems. She said our software crashed her computer and that we better get somebody out there right
Mitch Russo: We started running classified ads in Legal Tech and other journals. We were tracking these very carefully. If we spend $50 on an ad and if we got six or seven orders, we knew that the ad was great. We just kept doing it every week. We knew what was working and what was
Mitch Russo: All of a sudden, my whole business was gone. There was no longer a reason to be in business. Neil and I sat down together and we brainstormed. Where else can we use this technology that we created? We came up with the idea that there are other people who bill by their time.