Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where to from here? You are profitable already. Is this a company that now stops raising money and goes to some sort of exit in the near term?

Clark Benson: That’s a great question. We don’t have to raise money which is a great position to be in. I’m terrible at raising money, and I don’t like doing it. We turned profitable about 18 months ago. I’ve been so much more relaxed. I’m only working 55 hours a week now. We had occasional conversations with strategic partners who are interested in the data.

We may raise money only if there’s a strategic partner that will help us grow that side of the business a lot quicker. Obviously, I >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit about how your investors are viewing the scale potential of your company given the business model that you’ve chosen. What are the discussions that you have with your investors regarding scale?

Clark Benson: I need to explain something else to clarify that. Almost every other Internet publisher that were at our scale has raised 5 to 20 times what we’ve raised. We have a couple of other assets. Two assets that are not a core part of our business are over a hundred thousand definitive rankings of topics. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Ranker?

Clark Benson: We launched it in August of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: When you launched, what was the reception in the market?

Clark Benson: We launched the site with 20,000 lists on it. It started getting traffic. It took a few months to get search traffic. I’m not very good at hyping things. Back in those days, the idea was you launched, and Mashable and TechCrunch gave you early adopters. This was the case back in those days. I wasn’t very good at that. We got an article in TechCrunch, but I don’t think it led to anything huge. We didn’t have a lot of buzz. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model?

Clark Benson: We were living a little bit in a vacuum. The company had moved back to Chicago. I was in LA. I wasn’t very well networked in the Internet space at that time. There were very few internet companies in Chicago. My co-founders were not very well-networked. We turned eCrush into a PG-13 match.com for teens where you can not only find people you had a crush on but you could also reach out to other people. We did it in a way where there weren’t any safety issues.

We would get users to unlock features. If you wanted to unlock a feature, you would have to jump through a hoop. We made >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking now?

Clark Benson: I launched the company in 1995. I started launching other businesses about a year and a half later. I opened up a record store with a friend of mine. That was somewhat of a mistake. I had that for five years. I didn’t make a lot of money. I started a separate music marketing company in the 1997 to 1998 timeframe.

In 1999, in the 1.0 era of Internet, I was reading a lot of things about the Internet. I was very interested in technology. I was using the Internet a lot. I had an idea >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

“I hate raising money and I am not good at it…” – says Clark Benson, with a laugh. The company is growing nicely and profitably. Read on!

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?

Clark Benson: I was born in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I spent most of my life in Illinois. I went to college at the University of Illinois. I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in Finance. I was very business-focused. One interesting tidbit is that the undergraduate program at the University of Illinois is a pretty highly-rated business program. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: As you have built this business, are you selling through the charities directly or are there channel partners? You brought up Ritz-Carlton. Ritz-Carlton holds a lot of charity events in its ballroom and so do many other luxury hotels on behalf of major charities.

Jim Alvarez: Most of our business is gained directly through the charity. We do have some channel partners and some live auctioneers throughout the nation. We talk about it internally all the time. The Hyatt Regency in Chicago does 200 auctions a year. We handle about 20 of them. We have not figured out a way to break into the venues to become a preferred vendor. It’s something on our list of things to do in 2018. We mainly have feet-on-the-street salespeople. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The two of you got this product going. How did you find your customers?

Jim Alvarez: I literally went door to door. I said, “I have this idea to help you manage the whole fundraising process during the event. Will you take a shot?” This was a pretty big pain point that charities had. A few charities took a chance and hired me. I sit on all these panels all the time.

They always ask me, “When was the aha moment?” For me it was right in the very beginning when we did an event for a big hospital. We didn’t have real-time dashboards. We didn’t know how much the charity had raised. After the event, Katie Lu from >>>