Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 2)

Joshua March: I set out to build this business with no real mentors and no experience on how to do e-commerce. I managed to get off the ground and have a small, live business. I even hired a team to build a website. Then the financial crisis happened. The whole saga lasted for about a year and a half, ending with my failure.

At that time, I didn’t have any idea about raising money from investors or venture capital. I certainly wasn’t getting any more money from the bank. I had to shut down the company before I graduated. It was a painful experience. I was very lucky that I never had to make the company go bankrupt. The bank had a lot of losses due to the financial crisis and knew that they weren’t going to get much of their money from me. They basically allowed me to shut the company down and walk away from the loan without liquidating it. I took on all the other debts myself. I spent the next couple of years paying off all the other vendors. I thought I’d be a billionaire, instead I was in tons of debt.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Joshua March: It was 2007 when I graduated.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Joshua March: I wanted to delve in and understand why I failed. The biggest thing for me was I realized I had no real understanding about it. I had built this website and had no real idea of how to get it out there and find people online. So I dove into that world. I was spending hours and hours everyday learning about marketing and online marketing. It was around this time that Facebook launched their application platform, which allowed third parties to build applications on top of Facebook to engage customers. I was very excited about this. I was a Myspace user before that and was always active in social media. I saw this as an exciting opportunity to interact and engage with customers in a way that was never possible before. I started learning everything I could about it. I started spending a lot of time meeting with developers and learning to program myself.

I started to cold call companies saying, “This is going to be big. You really need to be on Facebook.” No one else were calling big companies in 2007 telling them to be on Facebook but everyone was excited or interested in it. Despite the fact that I was 21 and had no real experience in the industry other than the passion and the willingness to put myself out there, everyone was taking my call. I started to go and meet a lot of companies and started to get contracts and consultancy gigs to help companies build applications and get themselves on Facebook. That resulted in my teaming up with a more experienced programmer and building a company together.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March
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