Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a section of the website where you had a lot of descriptions and keywords that Google organic was picking up.

Peter Coppinger: Nothing intentional. Today, Google has changed it so that the people with the deepest pockets win. You could be listed on page two or three of Google and still get traffic volume. Today, there’s a lot more customers. Every channel is saturated. We were lucky we started when we did.

Then we built a very simple affiliate scheme. You didn’t have to subscribe to it. If somebody subscribed via that link, you would automatically earn 25% revenue share forever. That really helped. Pizza money was happening when there were clients in the office. We had to turn it off.

Our agency started to explode. We were running the agency, but our real passion is the product. We didn’t want to disappoint our agency customers. We tried splitting the company into two and having one division working on each. It was just too much. Eventually, we gifted our entire agency to another agency. They offered to pay us a million. We said no. All we wanted was they look after our customers. Today, they’re Granite Digital. They are the most successful agency in Ireland.

There was an interesting moment. We had this terrible domain – teamworkpm.net. We kept reaching out to the guy who owned teamwork.com. The guy wouldn’t even answer us. One night, I sent him another email. I sent an offer of $50,000. The guy replied, “Same lowball offer.”

I was so annoyed. I said, “Why don’t you just give a price?” He said, “I’d consider $675,000.” It was exactly 500,000 euros. We had exactly 530,000 euros in our bank account that we’d saved up. I thought about it for 30 seconds and went ahead. I called my wife and said I spent half a million euros. She couldn’t understand this at all.

It took me two days to build up the courage to tell my co-founder. I asked him for a meeting. I said, “We have an offer to buy the domain name for every penny we have.” He said that it was too much of a risk. I pulled out my Martin Luther speech. I said, “We can always make more money, but we don’t want to look back at this moment and regret it when we’re 70 years old.” He said, “Screw it. Let’s do it.” The moment we relaunched, our sales hockey-sticked. It was the pivotal moment that took us to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: The traffic was still coming from Google.

Peter Coppinger: Yes, now we hired more marketing people.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger
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