Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did that mean? You wanted to build products using the Facebook API. Did you have an idea what kind of a product you were going to build?

Joshua March: Facebook wasn’t the ruler of the world just yet. Myspace was still big. The consultancy gig that we were doing allowed us to do stuff on Facebook and also on these other social networks. It wasn’t completely clear that Facebook was going to dominate the world. Whilst we were doing these consultancy gigs on the side, my business partner Dan and I had the idea of building this product that would enable you to write an application once and then launch it on all of the social networks at the same time. We started working on that product while we were doing a lot of these Facebook gigs. It wasn’t big money at that time but there was a lot of people who were interested in it.

I also became involved with something called the Facebook Development Garage. This was towards the end of 2007 and early 2008. Facebook essentially put out an ad saying, “We’re building our development platform. If you’re involved in that community in London, we’d love someone to kick-start the event.” Three of us got together and decided to start organizing this event. I soon became Chairman and primary organizer. We ran this event, which became extremely popular. We actually ran it every month and got sponsorships not just from Facebook but also from other people like Microsoft. It turned into an event with over 200 people attending every single month looking at all the new and exciting things that were happening on the Facebook platform.

Doing that meant a number of things. It quickly turned me into this expert guy in London. I became a well-known person on the Facebook platform. Journalists would come to me. I also developed a close relationship with Facebook itself. When they started building their team in London, which was initially just sales people, they would get me in regularly to help educate the sales people on how the application platform works.

Because of this and the work that we’ve been doing, Facebook actually unveiled an official program where they selected 14 companies worldwide as official recommended developers for the platform. We were on that list and the only company in London. If you went to Facebook and say, “We want to do this,” we were the company they’d recommend. This coincided with a major shift that happened where before then, Facebook was pretty much experimental. If a company wanted to build an application, they’d have to find a budget somewhere just to do an experiment. There was certainly a shift where it became mainstream and it became part of the mainstream digital budget. Almost overnight, an application that was offering us $5,000 to develop became $50,000.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve invoiced over £100,000 in consultancy and service fees while in that single month, we invoiced £100,000 pounds. Something turned on and out of nowhere, it became this very big thing. That side of the business essentially is a service business. That grew rapidly from 2008 to 2009. We essentially gave up on the product part of it and built a whole agency to build these applications for big brands.

Sramana Mitra: This was happening in 2008?

Joshua March: Towards the end of 2008.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, were you still by yourself?

Joshua March: At that point, we started hiring rapidly. We quickly built a team. We got to about 15 or 16 people.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these sizeable projects did you get by the end of 2008 to support that kind of hiring?

Joshua March: I can’t remember the exact number now, but it was a lot. We were working with most of the big agencies. We were doing projects for McDonalds, Swatch, and The Economist.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March
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