From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 1)

Developers interested in bootstrapping ad-supported B-to-C startups would find this discussion valuable.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?

Matt Ramme: I grew up in western New York. I went to college at Carnegie Mellon and studied computer science. When I started, it was computer science and math. I wasn’t as much into math, so I was able to get a minor in German which I enjoyed.

After college, I took a job with Adobe out of Seattle. I worked for them for about six years doing various programming projects on a lot of their publishing software. I worked on a couple of different programs that never made it. Big companies often work on things that they don’t publish. Then I worked on InDesign, which is the publishing software that most newspapers and magazines use.

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

Matt Ramme: I started at Adobe in 1997. I worked for them for about six years. Then, I left to go start a company with four co-workers.

Sramana Mitra: All four of you were developers?

Matt Ramme: All five of us. The original goal was to work on biology software. It was a way to be able to help biologists look at their data and analyze it. We never completed that. Most of what we did was work on plugins for Adobe products. We had all these experiences from Adobe.

Sramana Mitra: All five of you came out from Adobe.

Matt Ramme: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You were writing plugins for Adobe as contractors.

Matt Ramme: Not for Adobe but for other companies. You buy InDesign from Adobe, but you need to customize it. You have to write all these add-ons. We were working with someone who helped build out that suite. We did a lot of work assisting them and building out those tools. That was what we did most of the time. We were still working on the biology product on the side, but we never completed it. Also during that time, the need was debatable. This was from 2003 to 2006.

Sramana Mitra: The work that you did for these Adobe plugins, how much revenue did that generate?

Matt Ramme: It allowed the five of us to support ourselves. Maybe a couple of million in the three years.

Sramana Mitra: Cumulative.

Matt Ramme: Yes, we were working as contractors. We weren’t working directly for the publishers, but somebody else contracted them and they started contracting us.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2006?

Matt Ramme: I had worked on application software since Adobe. You’re building things that people download and use. While that was interesting, the web continues to grow and kicked off in earnest. As time went on, websites became more and more interesting. The idea of being able to create something that I can show immediately was appealing; application software takes years.

You’re spending years where your work isn’t shown. It’s a lot of work. I was working on some stuff on the side. I enjoyed that. I just wanted to do more of that. I wanted to get out of application software into web software. That is why I stepped away from that company in 2007. I went off on my own to play with websites.

Sramana Mitra: What form does that take?

Matt Ramme: That’s when I started Sporcle.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme
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