Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you started doing this alone, how long did that solo journey last before you started hiring programmers?

Hank Luhring: Six months. My first client was Volvo Penta. The colleague of a former colleague called and said, “Do you know anybody who can develop some applications?” It happened to be a homebuilder’s association. They needed a new membership database. They had ideas for what they wanted the package to do.

Sramana Mitra: They needed a programmer.

Hank Luhring: Right. They didn’t want to hire a programmer and have that person on staff all the time. They wanted a project developed. I went over there. That’s another thing I liked about that business. The people who wanted a custom solution often had a vision for how they would do things differently.

I ended up working for some really sharp people who had it down about what they wanted to do. In fact, one of my clients was this company from Charlotte, North Carolina that had gotten into helping drug companies distribute drugs to patients who couldn’t afford them through normal channels. It was called Patient Assistant Program.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically doing all kinds of applications from different domains. There was no logic to it. You were basically acting as a programmer for hire.

Hank Luhring: Yes. We needed more work.

Sramana Mitra: Six months you were solo and then you started hiring other programmers you knew. How many were you hiring and at what clip?

Hank Luhring: Very slow. I hired one person after six months. Then one of the women that I worked with at Volvo went on maternity leave and didn’t want to come back full-time. She joined me part-time to do some admin work and marketing. Then another fellow I knew at Volvo was let go in downsizing. That was not a smart move on Volvo’s part. This guy was amazing.

He went to work selling window replacements door-to-door. He hated it. I remember approaching him, “Steve, instead of selling windows, how about we sell software? You can help me sell our custom software solutions.” He joined me. He was good. He was one of those guys who’d wake up at 4 AM and work out.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were you at the end of the first year and how many people were you at the end of the end of the second year?

Hank Luhring: After eight years, we were up to five people.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing all kinds of applications but all on Windows.

Hank Luhring: Yes. From 1999 to 2000, I saw that the web had come about. Not only that, there was the beginnings of a web application where a website could access a database on the backend. That really intrigued me. I was tired of the DLL hell that occurred on Windows. Also, I was tired of the services business. I felt like we were doing good quality software development, but it was our customers who owned the work.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue were you making with these five people?

Hank Luhring: It might have been in the $20,000 to $30,000 a month. Eight years, five people. I decided I wanted to have a product company. I have done some tracking applications for clients. The healthcare company in Charlotte was a tracking application.

For Volvo Penta, I did a tracking application for their warranty department. I was sitting at a client’s office doing some programming. I noticed the head of IT walking around and getting bombarded with questions. I thought that this guy is not going to get anything done because he kept getting interrupted. What if there was a system where the users could put in their request and then they can be centralized and prioritized?

Sramana Mitra: IT service desk concept.

Hank Luhring: Right. I decided to write a web-based tracking application. It was at the end of 1999. We started developing in 2000 in our spare time because we still had existing programming projects. In 2001, we went to a tradeshow and made our first sale.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak
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