Startup Memories: Recalling the Long (and Bumpy) Road to Online Marketing Success
In July 2003, I founded my current company Broadwick with partner Aaron Houghton. I had just finished my freshman year of college at UNC-Chapel Hill. Aaron was 21 and had just graduated with a Computer Science degree from UNC. It was just the two of us that summer, working out of a 700 square foot, three-room office in downtown Chapel Hill. For three months, I actually lived in the office, sleeping from 8am to 3pm each day on a futon and then working from 3pm to 8am at a desk just a couple of feet over.
When the summer began, we had three paying customers for our flagship product, a web-based email marketing tool called IntelliContact, which Broadwick had acquired from Aaron’s web development company Preation for a percentage of equity in the company. By the end of August, we had 21 paying customers. With each customer paying us around $50 per month, this meant we had monthly revenues of around $950 by the end of the summer. Not exactly impressive, but we kept at it.
One of the biggest challenges we faced at this point was how to pay for the things we needed, like servers, legal work, and advertising. We had to be very creative to find ways to keep costs low. Neither Aaron nor I took salaries and we used internal talents wherever possible in areas such as site design, search engine marketing, and programming. Being 18 and 21 with not that much of a track record behind us, we felt that trying to raise money from angel groups or VC firms would not be productive.
In September, we posted flyers at the local business school promoting a marketing and support internship at our company. A guy by the name of Josh Carlton saw the flyers when touring the school with his fiancé and gave us a call. Josh agreed to work for us at an initial salary of $1,000 per month. Three months into the business we were happy to have our first employee.
From 56 to 1289
By the fall of 2003, we started figuring things out. With five employees in tow and 56 customers in our reach, our acquisition rate had started to pick up due to a few low-cost marketing campaigns including a search engine optimization campaign, an affiliate campaign, and a publicity campaign.
Looking forward to the beginning of summer 2004. By this time, we were up to 400 customers and were really starting to hit our stride. Our partner campaigns and search campaigns were continuing to bring in business, as was general word of mouth. At the end of 2004, we had 8 employees, and 1289 paying customers, a good increase over 2003, but still not quite what we were striving for.
The Challenges of Creating a High-Quality Scalable Web App
Entering 2005, we were poised and prepared for another year of rapid growth and expansion. We weren’t quite sure what challenges we would have as we grew to 21 employees, but we knew there would likely be more challenges and different types of challenges than when we were a smaller organization. In 2003 and 2004, from an application performance standpoint, everything seemed to go well. But while we were able to provide good performance and uptime for our web service during 2003 and 2004, we were to learn in ‘05 that the difficulty of providing a bug-free, speedy and scalable application grows by something close to 16x rather than 4x.
The first problem we encountered that challenged us as an organization occurred immediately after our 3.0 release. Our development engineers had been working for six months on the release, which included a number of large changes to the underlying database structure of our application. We were already a couple months behind schedule, so when our team finished the last feature that was included in the release we were anxious to get it out into production. After about three weeks of testing, we released the 3.0 version of our product on April 3, 2005.
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