A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that story chronologically. You started that in 2004?

Todd Dunlop: Yes. We always talked about how we got started. It was sort of bootstrapping.

Sramana Mitra: You said AdWords was just coming on. You essentially helped companies understand AdWords and market through AdWords. That’s what you were doing?

Todd Dunlop: We were essentially arbitraging it where we would say, “If you pay us $10 per lead, we’ll go out there and drive the traffic.” We started as performance-based search marketers and grew the company. That’s how we discovered early on how we were going to finance this company. I believe it works everywhere. If you apply for credit cards all on the same day, they’ll only call your credit record once and so by the end of the day, we had $110,000 of available credit. That’s how we funded the company.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? I didn’t understand what you said.

Todd Dunlop: Realistically, we knew we had to go out there and buy a lot of media. We were four guys. We didn’t really have a way to fund this company. We knew we could fund this through credit cards and we found a loophole in the system to be able to get a lot of credit at one time. That’s how we funded our company. There was no outside investment.

Sramana Mitra: I see. So basically got a bunch of credit cards and you maxed those out to fund the company?

Todd Dunlop: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: As far as the business is concerned, you were maintaining a site of your own where you would drive traffic to and arbitrage that traffic to other companies?

Todd Dunlop: Yes. Back then, we were able to drive it directly to our end-clients.

Sramana Mitra: Walk me through how that works.

Todd Dunlop: We would find someone on a partner network who says, “For every lead, we’ll pay you $10.” We would go and buy the clicks on AdWords and then figure out the targeting we needed to find those customers to then be sent off.

Sramana Mitra: You were four people doing this. What were the scaling points? What did you need to do to scale this business?

Todd Dunlop: What we realized was if we were just going to buy the media, that was something that didn’t have a lot of scale. If we wanted to scale the business, we had to move up the food chain. Instead of buying media, we would look to make the relationship with the companies who wanted the leads. We would work with thousands and thousands of affiliates. We built our business around that.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner
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