A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go to work for them?

Jason Cohen: I did for just a little while, but at that time, I had already started another company with Gerry’s encouragement. In fact, when we started ITWatchDogs, I was hesitant to join a startup because I thought, “Maybe I should just increase my savings a little bit more by having a real job for a while.” He said, “Listen. Why don’t you come over and do ITWatchDogs with me?” ITWatchDogs was a month old.

He said, “At the same time, I have another idea for a startup.” That turned out to be Smart Bear. He said, “You do that and do ITWatchDogs. Maybe one of them will work and you can focus on that one.” I did and it turned out both of them worked. I had this insight about version control, which is a thing that software developers use to track the versions of the software that they write. Every time they edit some code, they save a copy of that. You can look back and you see years and years of all the code changing and shifting. They do this mostly to coordinate with each other. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It is very difficult to get any kind of financing for new companies from these community banks. I’m curious about how you managed to get that. Was Gerry offering a personal guarantee of some sort to get that money out?

Jason Cohen: Yes. He also had a history with the bank. Of course, you’ll say, “If I’m starting out, how do I get a history?” You don’t. That is a dilemma of course. Local banks don’t know how to finance startups. We had a rule with how we price things internally, which is “a third to sell, a third to build, and a third to keep”. The total cost wasn’t more than a third of the price. The rest of the expenses of the company like marketing and finance weren’t more than a third. That was the unit economics that we settled on. It worked well. Our products were cheap.

The competitors were maybe five times more expensive than our devices. We were very inexpensive. Because it was a small company, we didn’t have a lot of >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 1)

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

Jason has done three bootstrapped startups, sold two of those, and then bootstrapped a fourth one to heavy duty venture financing.

This is a great interview with a pro who knows what he is doing at many levels.

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?

Jason Cohen: I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. Austin, of course, is a popular place to be. It’s about 20 million people in the surrounding area. When I was born, it was 10 times smaller. I had jobs in high school. I was an intern at Aerospace writing code in their R&D department. I worked throughout college at local startups at Austin. Right after that, I started a consulting company. The consulting company and the next three companies were all bootstrapped and got over $1 million in revenue. Two of them were sold. For about 20 years, I’ve been doing startups and never worked at a huge company. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit the $1 million mark?

Shane Evans: I think we would have come just under it in 2013. In 2014, we would have been $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, you were at $1 million revenue. At that point, what was the distribution between professional services and actual product sales?

Shane Evans: In terms of revenue, it would have been heavily professional services.

Sramana Mitra: At what point did that start to shift? At what point were you able to get enough technology that you were able to start generating product revenues? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I know quite a bit about that kind of work because I did a lead generation software company earlier in my career that required lots of scraping and cleaning. It’s quite complicated and it’s very domain-specific. I am very aware of how very complicated this is. Did you launch this with any financing or was it a bootstrapped launch?

Shane Evans: It was a bootstrapped launch. I brought Mydeco as an early customer, and that really helped. It wasn’t too difficult to bring in one or two other customers. We took a very small amount of funding from a friend in Ireland to pay salaries. It was a very small amount.

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this in London or Ireland?

Shane Evans: My co-founder is from Montevideo, Uruguay. I went there for the winter. Then I came back to Ireland. I’ve been in Ireland since then. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next move?

Shane Evans: Let me give a background about what happened at Mydeco so the next move will make a lot more sense. As part of the platform we were trying to build, there was a big e-commerce part. Part of that e-commerce component was we needed some data from other websites. We had some affiliate relationship but that data was not available in the format that we could easily import. This led me to write a web scraping program.

I looked but I couldn’t find something that would actually work well for us, so I wrote my own framework. We worked with some outsourcing companies including one company in Norway. That company was founded by my current business partner. We worked together in Mydeco on this web scraping system. We open-sourced that. That had actually become quite popular by the time I wanted to wind down at Mydeco. There were a lot of people with the same problem. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the story?

Shane Evans: I was quite enjoying my time there. It turned into more of a big company. Once again, I found myself yearning for something that was a little bit different. I think it was late 2004 when I quit. During my time there, I had focused on some difficult technical challenging tasks that I was interested in. There were some constraints around having a lot of traffic on the website.

I started doing some consulting work with some of my friends. These are two friends who are really good engineers. We focused on challenges with scaling. We started working on what would now be called Big Data or data science. At that time, it didn’t have a name. It was also interesting for me that we had some initial contracts in London. After maybe half a year, we started getting work outside of London. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 1)

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

Shane has built a 140-people virtual team-based business from Ireland. Very interesting view into a different part of the world.

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?

Shane Evans: I was actually born in the UK. Both of my parents worked at Heathrow. My father is British but my mother was Irish. I think their involvement and love for travel had an impact on me. I came to Ireland when I was two years old and that’s where I grew up.

Sramana Mitra: What was your educational process like? >>>