Rich Waldron: Deep down, we weren’t that passionate about solving email. Email wasn’t a thing we had a problem with. We were being pushed to think through how you want to spend the next 20 years of your life.
Some of the bad traits from Europe that we’d picked up is pitching ideas that we thought would get funded and would perhaps lead to a quick exit than being something that genuinely moved you.
>>>Rich Waldron: There was one person who really liked us. The reason was, as a team, there is a clear CTO, a business person, and a product/CEO type. We had an interesting balance of skill sets. We were technically savvy. We were able to produce and build the things that we wanted to.
Even if our idea wasn’t necessarily in the right ballpark, we had real determination and a scrappy culture about us. They liked the fact that we weren’t prepared to quit. We kept plowing on.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2019?
JB Kellogg: We built the third version and released at the end of 2019. We’re excited about that because it truly makes us more of a technology company than we’ve ever been. Now we have do-it-yourself (DIY) functionality, and not just do-it-for-me (DIFM).
>>>Sramana Mitra: Talk to me in a bit more granular form what was going on. What kind of web development were you doing? What was the product idea that you were noodling with and then building?
Rich Waldron: In hindsight, providing services alongside product development was really important. We got a crash course in having to manage our own finances.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level in 2014? What was the split between product and service?
JB Kellogg: $20 million at that point. The mix was somewhere around 20% product and 80% services.
Sramana Mitra: Was it still bootstrapped?
>>>Rich is building an authentic tech company from London and while the company could have become a so-called Unicorn by loading up on liquidation preferences, they have chosen not to do so. Excellent story.
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?
>>>Sramana Mitra: How long did you continue in this services mode?
JB Kellogg: From 2009 to 2012.
Sramana Mitra: What revenue level did you reach in this mode?
JB Kellogg: I think that in 2012, our revenue was somewhere around $5 million.
>>>Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire customers for your digital marketing?
JB Kellogg: We always say that we eat our own dog food. Everything that we do for ourselves is what we sell to our customers. We started doing digital marketing for ourselves which generated leads. We would call those leads and open those accounts. It’s a recurring revenue business.
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