IContact

“We didn't take any outside capital. We lived in the office for the first year. We took no salaries for the first three years and just accrued them. And then once we got to a million, then we raised capital.”

“That we were an annuity cash flow stream engine that was trading 500 dollars up front for 1800 dollars over three and a half years, and that math allowed us to go to the investors, raise about forty million dollars over the course of the next five years, and s…”

“We subscribed to about a 100,000 of their customers' newsletters, and then as soon as we got them, we'd send a reply back offering them half off. That got us our first 500 customers.”

“We did the same thing with Microsoft List Builder back in 2003 when they were around, and what we got was a cease and desist letter from Bill Gates' dad's law firm.”

“We figured out that our average revenue per account, I call it ARPA instead of ARPU because, you know, multiple accounts, some accounts have multiple users, was 56 per account. 3.3% churn, which is normal for SMB.”

“We were spending two million dollars a month in sales and marketing by the time we got acquired. In early 2012, that 2000 dollars a month in sales and marketing was going to acquire 4000 new customers each month, about a 500 dollar customer acquisition cost, a…”

“In 2009, Marc Benioff reached out to us and he said, I wanna buy your company. We're gonna buy, pay you ninety-five million. I said, that sounds good, let's do it. He strung us along for a few months finally ended up buying ExactTarget a few years later. Walke…”

“We went to a mid-market growth equity firm out of Baltimore called JMI Equity. Worked with Jitson Ha over there and Brad Wallison, and we raised a forty million dollar round of capital with the help of an investment bank, Allen & Company. Fifteen million of th…”

“If we just add a shared account manager, we can take the same product and sell it for 20 times the price. So instead of selling it for 50 dollars a month, we sold it for a thousand dollars a month, and you got a shared account manager and a couple extra featur…”

“So we had 68,000 SMB customers, 1400 enterprise customers. Now, if you do the math, it's about thirty million in SMB revenue, twenty million in mid-market or enterprise revenue.”

“And we ended up selling in February of 2012 for one hundred sixty nine million dollars to Vocus, which is now owned by Cision.”

“I ended up making about fifteen million dollars after taxes but that's good.”

“We sold for three and a half times our ARR.”

“Literally, 33 minutes ago, the story broke that Moz was acquired by iContact.”

“Now, passing on this was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”

“We started the business in 2003, and you're right, we did everything we could to keep expenses low, sleeping on futons, eating lots of rum and noodles as we built up eye contact over the years to 70,000 customers, a little over forty seven million in annual re…”

“The secret with goals is if you're hitting 75% of your goals aren't ambitious enough, and most people feel bad when they don't hit a goal. I feel bad when I'm hitting too many of them, as ironic as that sounds. And so, you want your goals to be sufficiently am…”

“I remember we chatted last time about a goal I set when I was 16 to build a company to a million dollars in sales by the time I turned 21. And I told you I missed that goal by 18 days. But you know what? I was 21 years old in 18 days, and eye contact got to on…”

“In order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”

“Not only provided, you know, 500,005, which you raised a total of fifty three million dollars over the last five years at eye contact not only provided money, but actually provided, you know, strategic advice”

“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”

“I think the role of the entrepreneur is to constantly minimize risk. As ironically as that sounds, your goal is to arrange land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability to create a value of outputs that's greater than the sum of the inputs and to hopefully cre…”

“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips o…”

“When we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder…”

“We had a company coming to us That had made an offer to buy our company a couple years ago by eye contact, and I took it to the forum, and I said, is this something I should do? Is this not something I should do? And I ended up getting some very valuable advic…”

“It generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”

“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”