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

Sramana Mitra: We have touched the big milestones in 2009. You have started monetizing enough to get yourself salaries. You have brought in the CEO who’s helping you monetize. What is the next inflection point?

Matt Ramme: From the very beginning, I had a link to send feedback. People had a lot of ideas. We would take that and we’d build it. We needed to not be the ones creating all the content. Everybody has these ideas. We need to let them do it. I already created tools just for ourselves. I spent most of 2009 getting the tools to a point where they can be publicly useable where anybody can create their own quiz.

In the fall of 2009, I made it so that everybody could create quizzes on whatever topic they wanted. That was the next inflection point. That was massive. We knew that because they would send us emails. We’d get 20 to 30 emails a day. We had people who are dedicated to contributing stuff in a backdoor way that we then can publish.

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model around that?

Matt Ramme: It’s free. You don’t need an account. There were other sites that had quizzes and similar types of things. A few of them required you to create an account just to play. I never really liked that. If you’re monetizing from ads, you don’t need to prevent people who don’t create an account. We still like people to create an account. We give them all sorts of cool stuff if they do. We’re free-to-play and free to create content. They were excited to do it because we gave them an avenue for their creativity. They wanted to create something.

Even to this day, I’m flabbergasted by some of the things that our users create. That’s one of the biggest things that I enjoy. We create these tools for people to enter some data and create an experience. They take those and create things that I couldn’t even have conceived of. Seeing the creativity of people is fun. They would do something they couldn’t do. We’re like, “Let’s go create some tool to make it easier for them to do that thing.”

Sramana Mitra: How many such quizzes do you have on your site?

Matt Ramme: We’ve a few million quizzes.

Sramana Mitra: My goodness!

Matt Ramme: We’ve 4.5 billion quizzes played since the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: It’s all ad-monetized?

Matt Ramme: A few years back, we created a subscription service that has no ads and has a bunch of features mostly because people wanted it. We do have our user base who subscribe.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage is the business ads versus subscriptions?

Matt Ramme: It’s still probably 90% ads.

Sramana Mitra: It was the two of you and then you brought on a friend as a CEO. What else?

Matt Ramme: I have my VP of Engineering come on to manage the site and manage all the backend. He runs the engineering team. That was 2010. Now there are four of us. Then we kept growing from there.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have now?

Matt Ramme: Our engineering team has six or seven. We have a number of people in content. The model we’ve had from the beginning is one where users create content. Then we highlight the best daily. We put out 10 to 15 quizzes every day that we publish on the home page. People are still creating quizzes in the back and the best ones get surfaced. We have a team of people who are looking through that. The stuff that we publish, we make sure it’s up to date. When there’s a new president, we update it. When something changes, we keep the data up to date.

Sramana Mitra: So how many total?

Matt Ramme: Around 40 to 50 full-time. What I haven’t touched on is we have a different side of our business. We acquired a pub trivia company in 2013 that does trivia at bars. We have somebody who goes to the bar, asks questions, and teams play. Now we’re running around 500 shows a week across the country. There’s a whole team on that side too.

Sramana Mitra: That’s physical right?

Matt Ramme: Yes. We have a lot of part-time employees in the hundreds to go to the bar. They read the questions and score teams.

Sramana Mitra: These 50 full-time people, are those all in Seattle or is this a virtual company?

Matt Ramme: Probably half are in Seattle. The other half are virtual around the country. The company we acquired was in the Detroit area. We also have people both on the digital side and on the offline side who are all around. We have people all the way from the East Coast and in between.

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