A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You seem to be enjoying the process of starting something, figuring a niche, and getting it to a certain amount of revenue. The first one you scaled to $50 million in revenue, which was a substantial amount of revenue. It sounds like you like to figure it out and then sell the company. Is that accurate?

Todd Dunlop: That definitely has been my MO to this point. That challenge of the problem solving is something I enjoy and excel at. Ultimately, the real fun for me is cracking the business model.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Presumably you’re going to sell this one not too far from now because you’ve already figured out the business model.

Todd Dunlop: You never know. The biggest thing that I learned is you have to be happy to keep it and you have to be happy to sell it. You can’t be on either side. You’re in the best position when you’re happy either way. When you start thinking too much one way or the other, that’s usually when trouble happens.

Sramana Mitra: You obviously have some superior skill in figuring out business models. Talk about your process.

Todd Dunlop: What it comes down for me is a tremendous amount of testing. Especially for businesses that require a lot of technical changes, it’s about building a team that embraces that rapid change. They understand that what we’re working on may go off to be a huge thing or it might get canned. That has been a really big part of finding that team and not being demotivated by the fact that what we’re building may not be around because we’re just iteratively testing.

Sramana Mitra: In my experience, figuring out a business model is a lot of trial and error. It’s not so much the team. The team gives you the sustainability to perform those experiments. Is it the team that actually is the determining factor? This is a fairly intellectual exercise in my observation.

Todd Dunlop: When I reflect on why RingPartner is so successful today, the whole idea of doing performance-pay phone call isn’t new. There were two big reasons why this time RingPartner worked. One is the way people shop. People started using their phones. Earlier, people would go somewhere. Then it turned into the phone becoming their interface. The idea of going to the computer is overwhelming. Then the idea of filling out a form on your phone also is a lot of work. People started to call. They wanted instant information. That was a fundamental change.

The other part where we were really fortunate was we started this really small. It was literally two guys in a room. We were able to get that head start where we would have burned a lot of cash if we were a big company. The market was just starting to evolve in 2013. If we had a bigger team, we would have burned out the money. A lot of it comes down to timing. We were fortunate enough to have a great team that was excited to sit in the room and work on it.

Sramana Mitra: Timing is really hard to get right.

Todd Dunlop: Yes. When things aren’t going well, it’s very easy to think that you just need a little bit more. That could be the death of you too.

Sramana Mitra: I think timing is one of the trickiest things to get right. Terrific story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner
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