Using Facebook For Lead Generation: Underground Elephant CEO Jason Kulpa (Part 7)

Sramana: Where is Underground Elephant today? What is your revenue level, and what kind of growth rate are you seeing?

Jason Kulpa: We are growing very fast. We project to do $25 million in revenue this year which is up from $9 million last year and $2 million the first year. We are growing very fast, and we think we have good traction. We are a bootstrapped company, and that philosophy has done well for us. We plan to continue growing the company. We think we can keep on this growth rate by entering and gaining traction in new market segments. Auto insurance is on the landscape for us. We think our model and our technology platform is something that we can use across virtually any landscape. It does not apply only to for-profit education, financial markets, or insurance. We think we can be successful in a lot of other places.

We see ourselves becoming a main player in the industry. With the new regulations coming out in for-profit education, the old way of doing business has been changed. For example, you used to be able to arbitrage media. It was a very low barrier to entry to get into the business. You could hire publishers to help send you traffic. That has been obliterated. We were in the right place at the right time because we source all of our media internally and that allows us to be compliant.

We see not only the for-profit education space continuing to be a regulated space. That gives us confidence to work in mortgage and auto insurance markets, which are also highly regulated. Unless you control the message from start to finish, you can put your clients at risk. Our goal was to create a better user experience, but we have also created a safer medium for advertisers.

Sramana: What is the competitive landscape in your market?

Jason Kulpa: We have seen competition in this space resort to offline media sourcing techniques such as telemarketing or they invest heavily in SEO or organically generated content. They have been forced to do this because they used to use third parties to generate and source all of their leads. They had to completely change their business model. We find that telemarketing and offline techniques are bulky and difficult to scale. They also confuse the message. We want to be agnostic and remain behind the scenes. We want to remain underground.

When our competitors are forced to use telemarketing to make contact with a customer, we feel they are skewing their decisions. You are talking to them and convincing them of something. We want to simply present them with options and let them make their own decision. We see more people leaving the space and there is a higher barrier to entering our space, which is good news for Underground Elephant.

Sramana: I see companies all the time. This is a very interesting business, and you have built it in a very interesting way. Congratulations.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Using Facebook For Lead Generation: Underground Elephant CEO Jason Kulpa
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