From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Shane Neman: I have to remember because it was a long time ago. 

Sramana Mitra: I remember it very well. I don’t know if you know my background. I am a computer scientist from MIT. The period that you are describing – the 1994 to 2000 period – I founded and ran three startups as a founder and CEO. I remember in absolute gory detail exactly what happened on a daily basis at that time.

Shane Neman: As a side thing, that was when e-trade started. I had taken some of my money and put money into the stock market. I was watching the screen for the first time when I was 21 years old. It is a good analog to what is happening right now with Robinhood. It was almost like a game.

Sramana Mitra: The dotcom mania was totally a game. 

Shane Neman: It is very reminiscent of exactly what happened to me in my 20s. It was just a number and it was a game. When it started to go down, I was saying, “Oh, it’s going to go back up.” I didn’t believe it until I was left with nothing. I was buying all these high-flying tech companies that fundamentally had no business.

What happened then is a bunch of fortuitous stuff. At that time, my girlfriend was going to college in Manhattan. She worked at some of the night clubs at night to make some money and I would go with her. I’d look around and see how they were operating their business and doing their marketing. I then said to myself, “This is all kind of backward and old-school. Why are they printing flyers and giving them to people? Why don’t they have their own websites?”

Just to give an example, they would have people going around with clipboards and asking patrons to write their name and phone number so that they could call them and invite them next time. This all looked seemingly backward to me.

I decided to see if I could do it digitally and figure it out. At that time, the only thing online was Citysearch. I don’t know if you remember Citysearch. Essentially, I built a digital platform for the nightclub, bars, and lounges to digitize their marketing.

I created one of the first e-ticketing systems because at that time Ticketmaster wouldn’t service people like that and they wouldn’t give the data out. You also have to understand that this is pre-Myspace and pre-Facebook. The name of the company is called JoonBug. I’m not sure if it is around. It might not be because of COVID decimating the entire hospitality industry.

One of the things that we did that was interesting was we sent photographers with digital cameras. Back then, the flip phone had half a megapixel camera. No one had cameras at events. We would send these multiple photographers out at these events, they would take pictures and they would give you a card. The photographers would upload those photos into our systems. We would show it the next day and then we would capture their data to let them see the photos.

That went viral. You couldn’t see the photos without registering. We had a share function. This was pre-Myspace and pre-Facebook that we allowed the sharing of photos which would allow us to get your friend’s data. Within a year, we amassed over 1 million people into our database.

These are young urban professionals that have disposable income. These were the people that go out and buy luxury goods. That allowed us to build a website with an event directory to tell people where to go. We would charge people who had events to promote their events through service and email lists.

We were one of the first to create an events email inside your inbox. There was no Constant Contact or Mailchimp. I had to write my own software to send out half a million emails. Cisco bought Ironport. We had to buy Ironport servers and put them into a rack and program to load balance and send emails to multiple servers.

It’s something that people take for granted right now. It is abstracted away from you with services like Mailchimp. That didn’t exist then. At least not when you wanted to do large campaigns like what we did. We were one of the first to do that.

We had sponsors like Johnny Walker, Mercedes, and American Express. We parlayed that into doing our own events. We monetized our own database by doing our own events and issuing tickets. 

Sramana Mitra: This is about JoonBug?

Shane Neman: Yes, I did that for almost 10 years. 

Sramana Mitra: Was that a bootstraped company?

Shane Neman: It was nothing more than me sitting and creating my own website and putting a bunch of events. I wasn’t even programmatically doing it. I was just doing static HTML. I was writing the events and updating them myself during the first month.

I got a digital camera on a credit card because I couldn’t afford one. I would go and take the pictures and upload them myself and create the scripts and database. I had a hosting plan that was $10 a month. I had to constantly upgrade that because as we went up in traffic, it was not holding up.

It started with just an idea and a simple minimal viable product. Even though I didn’t even know what that meant at that time. 

Sramana Mitra: Ten years of this business, what kind of revenue level did you reach by doing it as a solo entrepreneur?

Shane Neman: We were doing close to $40 million in revenue. 

Sramana Mitra: You did this as a solo entrepreneur?

Shane Neman: No. At the end of the ten year mark, we had over 100 employees. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting
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