More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 5)

SM: You had to be cash flow positive for the majority of your business, correct? When did you start breaking even?

JJ: It is easy to break even when you are not paying yourself anything. It was not a typical scenario where we had a million dollars, ran with negative cash flow for a while, and eventually turned the corner. This was something that was positive cash flow on a monthly basis.

SM: Exactly. You only had $313,000, so after that you had to be cash flow positive.

JJ: We spent that very early on in 2000, and when it was gone decided we could quit or move into an apartment and just believe in what we were doing. We put everything else in our lives on hold while we got it going. It was part stubbornness, part stupidity, and part faith that what we were doing was going to work at some point.

It really comes down to a few iterations of the same message. We were just too stubborn to let it go. When you are desperate you get creative. We were desperate so we stuck with it. None of it is rocket science. People are doing it to monetize their sites everywhere now. Back in 2001 and 2002 what we did was unique, but it is pretty common now.

SM: How many people did you have when you sold the company?

JJ: We had 35 people.

SM: Can you break them down functionally?

JJ: There are 35 across both companies. There were 15 people on OneTime and 20 on VirtualTourist. Half of them were tech people or developers, and the next largest group would be sales. After that would be the managers and executives. We had a general manager for both OneTime and VirtualTourist, a CFO, and a VP of sales on Virtual Tourist who had seven people working for him in various capacities. That was a four-person sales team with a support staff, covering the entire country.

SM: Did you have any difficulty recruiting people because you were self-funded and did not have venture capital funding?

JJ: Everybody we hired had to come in and be trained on the business. We could not get a big resume from Yahoo! to come over. On the sales side, we were just hoping for people who had some sales experience. We were really looking for people who had a willingness to learn and work hard. We taught quite a few people the entire business.

The perfect example of this is the General Manager of OneTime, Dena Yahya . She was our fifth or sixth employee; I think she started in 2003. We gave her a business development title but she really came in just to help me with various tasks of running the business. She learned the business, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization, and she now runs OneTime. When we sold the business OneTime accounted for 50% of revenue.

It was tough to recruit, and it still is. It is a little easier now that we are a part of Expedia, I guess it gives people a little more confidence. When it is just a few of you, getting good people is tough. For whatever reason we were able to get good, smart people who may not have had all of the experience, but who wanted to learn, who were smart, and who did a great job.

This segment is part 5 in the series : More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson
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