From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It was just the two of you at this point.

Matt Ramme: Yes. In March of 2009, we made this our full-time job and got paid by the company.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the monetization. Were you using an ad network to monetize?

Matt Ramme: Originally, it was AdSense. We’ve used a variety of different ad network providers over the years. What’s interesting is how much I’ve learned about the ad world in the 15 years of doing the site. It wasn’t necessarily what I thought I would learn, but I know a lot more about how the ad networks in the world work. We bought our own ad server for a while. Things are constantly changing.

Sramana Mitra: Which ad network became productive for you?

Matt Ramme: Google, since day one, has been and still is the biggest. But you get other networks. You get people doing direct stuff. Most of our stuff has been programmatic. You just get a number of different ad networks together.

Sramana Mitra: What denomination are we talking about? What kind of traffic was it?

Matt Ramme: In 2009?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Matt Ramme: I don’t know off the top of my head. We used to have hundreds of thousands of page views daily. I don’t remember the exact scale.

Sramana Mitra: When you started paying yourselves, what are we talking?

Matt Ramme: At that time, I was making about what I would do as a developer. We had enough to cover salaries and the server cost. It was enough to have a real salary.

Sramana Mitra: You supported yourself with a contract software job for a little bit, but the two of you managed to get to a situation where you had enough ad revenue to support yourselves by about 2009, which was three years after you started this business.

Matt Ramme: Two and a half. I started in January 2007 and it was March of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens?

Matt Ramme: All along, I had a friend of mine who is currently our CEO. He helped with the ad side of things. He worked on a couple of companies that had used ad networks. He was able to use his know-how to make our monetization better than with just AdSense. He was able to get our monetization to a point where we could make more. Even in monetization, you still needed traffic. It was a two-headed beast.

We continued to make more content. More people would come to the site. All of our traffic, from the beginning, has been completely organic. We haven’t paid for any traffic. It was all people finding it and sharing it. We got an article written in The Times of London. He wrote about how we tried to memorize the periodic table. All of a sudden, we saw a ton of traffic from the UK. The way that we kept growing it is we brought on Ali to monetize better.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme
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