From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom’s Wildfire Journey (Part 3)

Sramana: How did Kayak and Zappos find out about you?

Victoria Ransom: Zappos had an employee who went on some vacations with Access Trips. We reached out to him, and he put us in touch with the right person. Kayak had heard of us, and at the same time we were doing outreach through our business school networks. Once those two came, we realized this was more than just a side project and that we had a real product. We expanded the sweepstakes module outside of Facebook and made it a standalone application. We enabled the capability to run campaigns on different social networks, and we expanded to include any use engagement outreach you wanted. No technical expertise was required to use the product.

I graduated from business school in the summer of 2008. I drove out to Silicon Valley largely because Facebook and our partners were out here. We worked out of a home office and bootstrapped the business. We ended up applying for the Facebook fund. We went through the selection process, and at the end of 2008 we were selected as one of five companies, which gave us a $250,000 grant. We did not know that we needed the money, but as it turned out I don’t know how we would have survived.

Sramana: How much did you charge for the product?

Victoria Ransom: We did not charge for the original prototype. We spent more than a year building an expanded version of the product. We were not generating revenues at that time. We had been self-financing and relying on funds from Access Trips. Getting the money from Facebook let us hire engineers and accelerate the project.

In the summer of 2009, we were ready to launch the expanded platform publicly. We had four engineers who were remote. We launched and immediately got good traction. The Facebook fund, fbFund, helped grow interested in what we were doing. It gave us credibility. Our first customers signed up and got us more customers. Within the first month of coming out of private beta, we made $100,000 in revenues, which was enough for us to hire some initial people on the business side. We already had a person who was helping us with customer support. We hired our first sales person who is our VP of sales.

Sramana: What was the business model?

Victoria Ransom: At that time it was a per-campaign model. The entry-level option was 99 cents a day. Larger brands could be charged several thousand dollars for more complex campaigns. We had several small companies come to the site and establish their campaign without any customer support required. Larger clients were willing to pay more and wanted to have someone to talk to. Until the end of 2009, we had just a small team. We realized that the sales model was going to be a big driver for us, so we hired two more sales people in early 2010. Today we have almost 300 employees.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom's Wildfire Journey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7