Bootstrapping to $13 Million from the UK: David Lloyd, CEO of The Intern Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing revenue-wise? You started in 2011. What revenue level did you finish 2011 at? How long did it take you to hit the $1 million revenue run rate?

David Lloyd: In 2011, our revenue was $20,000. We hit $1 million in early 2013.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013, you’re still self-funded?

David Lloyd: Yes. We’ve always been entirely self-funded.

Sramana Mitra: The thing that is the most interesting are the strategic maneuvers and the inflection point? What did you do strategically that are worth discussing and worth for people to learn from?

David Lloyd: The most important thing to focus on is, many entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs focus on raising capital. There are other ways. We had many people offering to invest in us. I think for some individuals, the self-financing model is brilliant. You don’t have outsiders influencing you to do things you don’t want to do. Growing off your customers’ cash is beautiful and doesn’t get enough traction as a strategic idea. That’s the first one.

Another thing that I think is a worthy talking point is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can just do things better. There are one or two companies that were doing what we did when we started. Frankly, we looked at what they are doing, evaluated what they were doing well and what they weren’t doing well, and decided to do similar to what they were doing well but just do it better. That is another worthy talking point.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Many of the best companies in the world just do what others were doing better.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do strategically in terms of customer acquisition that worked for you other than the brute force non-scientific stuff? At some point, to get to the levels of revenues that you managed to get to, you must have some sense of something strategic coming together? What were some of those conclusions on customer acquisition on both sides?

David Lloyd: On the theme about intelligent copying, we would look at what our competitors were doing, which websites they were featured on. We would use that. We saw that many competitors were using a couple of websites which were like the TripAdvisor for our industry. We would get listings on that.

We went quite heavily on SEO. We, quickly, were ranked first or second on Google for terms like London internship. We realized that to grow the student demand, there were three things we could do. We could open up new destinations because there are many exciting Google searches who want these overseas experiences. We also started to heavily invest in university relationships. We could get students one by one.

If we have a university partnership, they can send us a hundred. We started to see if universities would incorporate our programs into their degrees. That has increasingly happened. An example of that would be King’s College in London that incorporates our program. Last year, they sent a hundred students. Then it was also heavily investing in the digital marketing. A great place to be is to get half of our students directly and half of our students from partner universities. That was the student side.

On the company side, we also did digital marketing. We realized many companies were looking for interns. We started to advertise on Google AdWords and we also encourage companies to recommend other companies to us and incentivize that. The strategy paid off. Now we work with 2,000 companies around the world and it’s growing every day. There’s always a lot of hard grind work. A lot of it is still the old brute force.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $13 Million from the UK: David Lloyd, CEO of The Intern Group
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