Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What marketing channels were producing for you?

Peter Coppinger: The referral was a nice slow burner that cost us nothing. We did affiliates. We did Google ads. It works,but there’s a point of saturation. It probably worked better years ago.

Sramana Mitra: It’s expensive now.

Peter Coppinger: The only one making money is Google. Deep integrations also worked.

Sramana Mitra: Which integrations did you do?

Peter Coppinger: Harvest Time Tracking. It’s a popular time-tracking application in the project management space. Today, we have a hundred integrations on our website. We have a very deep integration with HubSpot.

Sramana Mitra: HubSpot is a very good example. Slack is a good example. They do support their partner ecosystem heavily. Do you get a lot of leads from them?

Peter Coppinger: Not direct leads, but people choose us because we have the integration.

Sramana Mitra: Are you on their marketplaces?

Peter Coppinger: We are. We get a little bit of that. We have co-marketing and a lot of articles about how we integrate with HubSpot.

Sramana Mitra: You said that you are fully bootstrapped and you just took money last year. 2009 was when you started Teamwork. What revenue level did you reach before taking money?

Peter Coppinger: $36 million. We just crossed $40 million a month ago. It’s accelerating. We thought about whether we wanted to be this huge company or just enjoy the work we’re doing and have a great lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with either path. In the end, we took some money off the table and paid for our houses. That helped us with our risk appetite.

Sramana Mitra: The money that you raised was to give yourselves some liquidity?

Peter Coppinger: We took money off the table out of our bootstrapped business first. We took a bit off when we paid for our houses. The nice thing about being bootstrapped is, there was only two owners – myself and my co-founder. We did a carve out for the employees as well. We were just debating.

In the end, we went for it. We had a super strong vision for what we were doing as a platform. We had a strong brand name. We really believe in the mission we’re doing. We think we understand the space better than any of our competitors because we actually ran an agency.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you are a vertical cloud player now catering to agencies. How big is the agency market?

Peter Coppinger: It’s agency and client work for anyone who’s office-based and only makes money by completing projects or charging for their time. The client work space is huge. You’re talking about accountants and architects. We are absolutely perfect for them. There’s over 40,000 agencies in North America alone. It’s a monster market worldwide. We believe that we can be the best platform in the world in this space.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger
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