Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 3)

Sramana: Who were the early adopters of 99Designs?

Matt Mickiewicz: The earliest adopters were Silicon Valley and New York startups. In the first couple of years in the business we did not do any marketing. We relied on press, media attention and word of mouth.

Sramana: How did you get press? That can be very challenging to do early on.

Matt Mickiewicz: We found it to be relatively easy to do because we rode the crowd sourcing bandwagon in 2008 and 2009. There were a lot of bloggers, podcasts and webcasts about it. I had a compelling story having started my first company in high school. Over the course of a year I did 60 or 70 different press interviews. I spoke to anybody who would write something up, I didn’t care if they had 5,000 visitors to their blog or 5 million.

Sramana: In 2008 you spun out 99Designs. What kind of revenues did you do that year?

Matt Mickiewicz: We were profitable that very year. We did not have to raise any money to get the business going and we made a profit that very first year.

Sramana: Did you raise any money to get this business going?

Matt Mickiewicz: We raised 35 million dollars from Accel Partners a couple of years into the business. We bootstrapped the first several years.

Sramana: How far did you go on a bootstrapped basis? How long do you think an entrepreneur should bootstrap their business before taking on funding?

Matt Mickiewicz: It is cheaper than ever to create products and services. When I started my first company we had to do everything from scratch. We had to create our own shopping cart, ecommerce system, email marketing platform and mail. Today you can go to Amazon Web Services and get everything cheaper and better than ever. Y Combinator is a great example of building things incredibly quickly for less than 20,000 dollars. Investors want to see a viable product before they start investing, especially from first time entrepreneurs.

Sramana: In most cases these days it’s not the product, it’s a proven business model, revenue generating business that they want to invest in.

Matt Mickiewicz: Exactly. It is cheap enough to get started that anybody who is truly driven and motivated can get started. Most people are expected to have a business running.

Sramana: Did you raise 35 million dollars in one round?

Matt Mickiewicz: Yes. We had significant levels of revenue, reaching into 8 figures a year. We had achieved that within 3 years.

Sramana: Reaching over 10 million dollars in revenue in three years is very notable. Can you talk more about that? How did you achieve that scale?

Matt Mickiewicz: We focused on a consistent experience for our end customer. We had a customer service team in San Francisco as opposed to outsourcing it. We had support 24×7 available via phone, chat and email. We made sure that every single person who purchased from us had a great experience. Word of mouth was our main driver so we treated every single transaction as an investment as opposed to a cost center.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz
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