From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the financial engineering of an acquisition like this? You have not raised any money for this company, right? Matt Ramme: Correct. Sramana Mitra: Private companies acquiring private companies is very complicated to pull off. Talk a little bit about that.

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have touched the big milestones in 2009. You have started monetizing enough to get yourself salaries. You have brought in the CEO who’s helping you monetize. What is the next inflection point? Matt Ramme: From the very beginning, I had a link to send feedback. People had a lot of ideas. We

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From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It was just the two of you at this point. Matt Ramme: Yes. In March of 2009, we made this our full-time job and got paid by the company. Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the monetization. Were you using an ad network to monetize? Matt Ramme: Originally, it was AdSense. We’ve used a

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From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 3)

Matt Ramme: Another big interest was puzzles and watching Jeopardy. I’ve always been a fan of that. As I got into that, my wife and I would play a lot of crosswords. What I kept finding is that the more I do it, the more I realize there’s a certain subset of trivia data that,

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From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the thesis of Sporcle? Matt Ramme: I didn’t know. I had an idea to build a website. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I liked the creation of websites. If you’re familiar with the March Madness Bracket for collegiate basketball where millions of people do it every year.

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From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 1)

Developers interested in bootstrapping ad-supported B-to-C startups would find this discussion valuable. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background? Matt Ramme: I grew up in western New York. I went to college at Carnegie Mellon

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