Revolutionizing the Limousine Service: Limos.com CEO T.J. Clark (Part 2)

Sramana: What happened after Hotwire.com?

T.J. Clark: We sold Hotwire.com to IAC/InterActive Corp in late 2003. I stayed on the IAC corporate team for four years. What an incredible experience that was! At the time they owned 85 Internet brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, ServiceMagic.com, LendingTree.com, Match.com, and several other businesses. I was exposed to a lot of different business models as well as very bright entrepreneurial people inside a dynamic business. It was very helpful and built my confidence.

Those business models attracted me to Limos.com, where I essentially took my experiences from Hotwire.com. People are always interested in travel and they want to do their searches and compare search results online. I just extended that into a new category, ground transportation, which had not been tackled properly.

Sramana: What is the genesis of Limos.com?

T.J. Clark: It was a very small business that had been started by a guy who was a chauffeur in the limo business. He had built the company into a directory-style business with a lead generation component. It had an amazing URL that we were very interested in because it was generating a lot of free traffic. To make Limos.com successful, I reached out to some of my colleagues from Hotwire.com. We got together and had informal meetings for three months. We studied the business and the space very carefully, and we plotted our entrance into the space with a considerable amount of detail. We all wanted to feel like this could work and we wanted to have a business plan in mind before we left our day jobs.

Sramana: Were you eyeing Limos.com as a personal takeover to be done by your small group of friends?

T.J. Clark: That is correct. This was in late 2007.

Sramana: How big was Limos.com at that point?

T.J. Clark: It was generating about a million dollars in revenue.

Sramana: This was the revenue generated by the chauffeur. Was the SEO factor of the domain name good enough to drive that many people to the site?

T.J. Clark: Yes. He was a visionary guy. He taught himself code. He saw the downturn of the Yellow Pages, which created an enormous amount of opportunity for categories of businesses that were going to fill that void. Those were businesses that would be reached by people doing searches through Google. The big wave of companies that sprung up in the downturn of the Yellow Pages were directory sites, and after that lead generation sites. We felt the next evolution beyond that would be to do the booking engine. Not only could you do searches and find the services you were looking for, but you could transact with those businesses. That is still my vision of what will happen on the local web.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Revolutionizing the Limousine Service: Limos.com CEO T.J. Clark
1 2 3 4 5 6 7