Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Of the thousand, what was the split between buyers and sellers?

David Ciccarelli: Pretty close to 50/50. That has been our intention right from the get-go back from that partnership agreement. We knew that several marketplaces fail because they focus on one side of the business and neglect the other. We need to consider the needs and desires right down to features and communication plans. That’s been the split even today.

It’s a little bit more on the buy side because we’ve discovered that if the clients are coming, the talent will follow. The talent will always go where the work is. More of our time and energy now is shifted towards the clients. That’s because we know that that’s what makes the talent the happiest.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look back on other strategic maneuvers that have helped to scale the business, could you recall other such moves?

David Ciccarelli: Absolutely. There’s one that really stood out. It was the acquisition of the domain name. We originally started with interactivevoices.com, which is a bit of a mouthful. This was when that whole Web 2.0 was very popular. Companies were just getting launched. It was a whole generation of Internet companies. I was on a quest to change our name because we wanted to ride this trend.

We put in a bid of $100,000 for vox.com. Of course, Vox Media won that and owns the name. We looked at a number of other iterations and failing on all of those fronts to the point that we recognized that rather than rebranding entirely, maybe a name simplification was in order. What if we could cut off the interactive part? Like what many entrepreneurs have done, you pull up the browser and type it in. I discovered that there was a website called voices.com, “Silencing the Critical Voices in Your Head.” It was a medical journal. Its last entry was 2000. Fortunately, it wasn’t a large multinational.

Sramana Mitra: You lucked out on that one.

David Ciccarelli: We asked our lawyer if he did corporate law. I said, “Do you think you can be our lawyer and send this fellow an email and ask him if he will sell the name.” When he came back, he said, “$50,000.” This was a deal. An aspiring entrepreneur doesn’t have $50,000 cash laying around, so I went to every bank in the city and explained that we had a business and we were going to relaunch under this simplified brand name. They all said no. Our lawyer taught us a very important lesson, which is to never take no for an answer. If you heard correctly, he was wiling to sell the name.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a bigger hurdle.

David Ciccarelli: Yes. We developed a counter offer to acquire the name for $30,000 and we would send $5,000 every quarter for the next six quarters. With that, he went for the deal. Over a weekend, we were able to relaunch the company as voices.com.

Sramana Mitra: That, I can tell, would be a big deal because in your business, having that domain would give you a huge SEO advantage.

David Ciccarelli: Exactly. On that very note, we were spending $3,000 to $4,000 a month. When we switched, one of the key factors that Google’s algorithm was putting a lot of weight on was the age of the domain name. It was registered in 1998 before Google itself. Time is one of those things you cannot manipulate on the Internet. Our organic traffic from Google tripled overnight.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli
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