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Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 7)
Sramana: What kind of numbers do you have? How many engineers apply to be on your platform? Matt Mickiewicz: We typically have 2,000 to 3,000 engineers apply every month. Of those, we accept the best 150 or so engineers. We take care of the upfront vetting. We look at their intent to switch jobs as
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 6)
Sramana: Tell me a bit more about the value proposition of DeveloperAuction. Matt Mickiewicz: We are a two-sided marketplace for hiring full-time engineering talent in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. The basic premise is that we curate a pool of 150 engineers every single month who went to the top computer science schools and
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 5)
Sramana: In three years you gained huge traction. How dramatically has your adoption curve changed? Matt Mickiewicz: We have been pushing international expansion heavily. We are seeing which markets work for us. The growth curve has continued very strongly. Our CEO has done a very good job. Sramana: Have you changed CEOs or have you
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 4)
Sramana: Why did you decide to raise money? Matt Mickiewicz: To expand our marketing and increase customer acquisition. We also wanted to pursue international expansion. We used the money to hire a chief marketing officer, a chief financial officer and expand internationally, which included language expansion. Recruiting in San Francisco is much easier when you
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 3)
Sramana: Who were the early adopters of 99Designs? Matt Mickiewicz: The earliest adopters were Silicon Valley and New York startups. In the first couple of years in the business we did not do any marketing. We relied on press, media attention and word of mouth. Sramana: How did you get press? That can be very
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 2)
Sramana: You started that website while you were in high school. What happened after you graduated? Matt Mickiewicz: The business went really well up until the dot-com crash. All of our advertisers went bankrupt, which make me scramble to find an alternative business model. I turned to book publishing. I published over 70 books in
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Matt Mickiewicz, who was named to the Forbes Magazine “30 under 30” list in 2012, co-founded 99designs. The company has hosted more than 200,000 design contests and paid out more than $50 million to designers, while winning a 2010 Webby Award for “Best Web Service” and
Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 7)
Sramana: What did you do, strategically, after you achieved profitability? Dan Rodrigues: Once we turned the corner and made positive cash flow we re-invested it in our business by purchasing more advertising, buying another server or hiring another customer support representative. We started to grow the business slowly but surely. That kicked off act three