From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 3)

Matt Ramme: Another big interest was puzzles and watching Jeopardy. I’ve always been a fan of that. As I got into that, my wife and I would play a lot of crosswords. What I kept finding is that the more I do it, the more I realize there’s a certain subset of trivia data that, if you know, you can get farther into it.

For example, knowing all the states and state capitals, knowing the presidents, and knowing all these lists of data that are well-known. During this time, I was trying to learn more myself. By learning it myself, I was using pieces of paper as flashcards. At that point, I’m like, “It seems like there’s a better way to do this.”

I go online and look for some kind of product to make it easier for me to memorize information. I went around and I didn’t find anything I liked. Half the time, the information was wrong. It wasn’t fun to play. It wasn’t very interesting. I decided to make it myself. I did that. The first quiz was the names of the presidents. It was a big grid of empty boxes. You just have to type in the names of the presidents. At that time, there were 44. You can play it and see what you got wrong. I put it on the site.

It got picked up by Digg back then on July 4. It made it to the front page of Digg. It got a couple of hundred thousand plays in a day. It got more attention than anything I’ve ever gotten before. I often tell anybody who’s trying to do something to create something that you want. You got a decent chance that somebody else might want it too. This tool I created to learn things, I just created for myself because I wanted it. It got put out there and lots of other people wanted it.

Sramana Mitra: Was there any financial benefit out of it?

Matt Ramme: It had an ad on it. I decided to create more of it. I continued to add more. Every time I would put a new quiz, I’d send it to all my friends. Each time I would put a new one, it would get more plays. Then we started to get links from other sites. Over the next six months to a year, I just kept building out more quizzes on these topics. The page views kept going up but still not enough to support me.

Sramana Mitra: The ad rates are abysmal.

Matt Ramme: They were there. The users weren’t enough. It was way better than anything else I had done. It kept growing. After about a year, I still wasn’t making enough money to support myself. I ended up taking a contract job working on a plugin for Facebook to do messaging. This was before Facebook had chat. They came out with a chat about three months later. It was short-lived.

During that time, I kept making more quizzes and adding more features. One of the things that I did was put links between quizzes. When I did that, the traffic quadrupled in a day. I made it easy for people to find more of the content that they liked. I kept doing more of it. I had a friend of mine who had a different job and he was interested in a similar role. I showed him the site. He got on and started helping me make more quizzes.

I created some tools. I was doing it all by hand, but then I created an interface so that he can enter data and move stuff around. It was an early ability to make your own quiz. The traffic kept going up and more people kept coming. By the beginning of 2009, we had enough traffic and enough consistent users that the site could pay us now.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme
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