Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you get your first manufacturer customer?

Jared Shusterman: We got the first one who really helped us understand the beauty of the model in December.

Sramana Mitra: December of 2006?

Jared Shusterman: No, 2005. That’s how we discovered that this was a much more interesting model than the original model that I started with. At that point, the whole idea changed and I hired our first employee in January. I remember everyone thinking I was crazy, because I had only so much money to spend. He’s still with us today. He’s our CTO.

He moved away from this freelance mode to build a platform based on what we’ve learned on servicing this jewelry manufacturer. He came on in January of 2006. We spent the first six months building this new model based on what we learned. We signed our first legitimate client probably in April of that year as we were building out the platform in June.

Sramana Mitra: What did the platform contain?

Jared Shusterman: The platform created this concept of us serving two different clients – us serving the manufacturer and then allowing the retailers to log in and see the advertising that the manufacturer had made available. Earlier, it was a generic library of direct mail marketing programs that retailers could buy. We threw that prototype out.

We completely trashed the code and we started over. We built something that allowed there to be a connection where a manufacturer could manage the various small business marketing programs.

Sramana Mitra: This platform was ready in June of 2006 and you basically launched with your first customer?

Jared Shusterman: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You were working mostly within the jewelry segment or were you already selling outside of jewelry?

Jared Shusterman: I was still in jewelry, but we were starting to sell outside of jewelry. As we started doing that, we realized that this was a much bigger problem than just jewelry. Any brand that sells through an independent third-party has trouble helping that third-party advertise in their local communities in a brand-compliant way. As we started looking at other industries, we found that in order for us to do this right, we had to get beyond one marketing tactic.

We needed to start adding marketing tactics to our portfolio, because depending on the industry that you’re in, direct mail may not work. It may be email marketing. Fast forward to today, we have pretty much every marketing tactic available in our ecosystem from paid search to display advertising all built on our platform where we’re helping brands advertise through their channel partners using these tactics.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Are you charging now as a SaaS?

Jared Shusterman: There’s a couple of different revenue centers. We have a platform fee for our enterprise platform. We have a monthly software fee that we charge the brand. We have a professional services team which may be customer support or custom development. Then there’re all these different marketing modules and marketing tactics on our platform where the brand can either use their providers to power the service and the platform.

For example, if they have their own printer to do all their direct mail, we can plug that printer in. Yesterday, we got over 70 marketing service providers that are powering each service on the platform. Think of our software as an integration allowing all of these small businesses to advertise in whatever medium they want to advertise in a compliant way that’s linked to the national strategy of the brand.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman
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