Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 2)

SM: What year did you turn your Web design services company into an e-commerce engine?

KS: The first version of Volusion came around 2001. I released a lot of the marketing around it in 2002. It was branded as Store 2002.

SM: How did you go to market? Were you doing custom software work based on that engine?

KS: The custom Web development stopped in 2001. In 2002 I really focused on branding and really tried to make it more of a SaaS, hosted e-commerce platform. That was not a common thing back then. I had focused most of my time on building the engine itself, and it could be hosted elsewhere if needed. If they hosted it elsewhere, I sold the source code, which cost more.

SM: How did you find your customers?

KS: When I started doing custom Web design work it was pre-Google. I did not have AdWords, but there were other companies that did pay-per-click, such as Overture. It was only pennies per click, and now it is dollars per click. That is how I got started, although I did some banner ads as well.

SM: How much revenue did you make in 2002?

KS: I didn’t really do much in 2002. In 2003 we did $131,000.

SM: Did you finance all of this yourself?

KS: Exactly. It was all funded with self-generated revenue. I was really lucky to get a credit card when I was young. I had a $10,000 credit card, and by 2004 I had maxed out all of those cards just to run the business. To start the company I was only paying a couple cents per click, so most of the investment was time. I would do some freelance design every now and then and re-invest a couple thousand dollars. There was a big ROI based on my time. It was like having a job and investing everything I would have earned back into the business.

SM: When did you pick up employees?

KS: I went on and off with employees. A lot of it was more part time back then. As you might expect, I was not a genius business person who knew how to manage employees. I have learned that over the past ten years. Back then, it was a challenge to find employees and manage their tasks and projects as well as motivate them to do quality work. I was hiring very junior people, so I went through a variety of different hires. Two or three of the hires I had found from school, where I just put up a flyer in the classroom at high school. That was just for the custom Web development. I just put the flyer in the Web design classroom. I am not sure if that helped me or not because I really had to train them how to code websites well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion
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