Building Internet Business, Market Leap

Monte:-“Looks like we have to pay Bill Gates some more money, Tell us some more about your business. A bit about Market Leap, how you brought that company to be successful. Some of the lessons learned.”

Noel:-“Its kind of long story. About 5 years ago Paul Owen and I started the company in San Francisco. We were webmasters here out in Silicon Valley, doing the corporate consulting game and helping a lot of people build websites and internets and on one particular project I was working on I launched a particular website and was responsible for all the aspects of the website. But nobody really knew much about it like “Okay, now the site’s live how do you bring people to it, how do you get traffic?” and I was dealing with a client that had a very limited marketing budget. So I couldn’t go out a blow a lot of money on banners or visuals or anything else. The search was sort of an emerging idea and so then I started looking for some expert help. I had some great friends up in Bend, Oregon who knew of a guy from the company MMG, or Multimedia Marketing Group, just as a fast-forward, that company became known as Outrider. Some people that became great friends of mine- Marcia Simmons, Stedland Johnson, Derrick Wheeler, Jeremy Sanchez, Chris Herman, all these guys who were at this company called Multimedia Marketing Group, and it was recommended that I hire them to help me do some search on this project of mine. So I retained these guys and we had incredible results and it was probably the funnest project that I ever done with respect to being a webmaster. I loved it and it was cheap. You know you could do a lot of it right there, you didn’t have to get into media buys, of course this was way before the P for P days. And so I had so much fun doing it that about a year and a half later I was going to get into this business and part of it was that I was driven by the fact that I was living in San Francisco in the late 90’s and that’s when it was just hopping and everyone was just going crazy and they were all starting a business and making a lot of money and I decided that, I had always wanted to start my own business and it seemed like there wasn’t going to be a better opportunity, the soil wasn’t going to get any better to start a new business and of course this was in October or November of ’99.”

Monte:-“Back in the good old days.”

Noel:-“What was the worst thing that could happen? You know? Our business would fail and kind of because it was out first business or my first business to start we kind of first thought of it to fail. Then we thought if we could make it to two years we’ll consider it a success. Then we would learn and we’d move on. Then the worst thing to happen is we’d have to move on and take a great job at one of the many hot internet companies in the valley. Well you know what happened, six months later the whole bottom fell out. The market crashes, there’s a six week waiting list at U-haul in San Francisco, and of course the costs of living here is insane. And all of a sudden I realized ‘Oh Shit we have got to make this thing work.’ And it actually became a real blessing in disguise because a lot of internet marketers started having their marketing budgets slashed. You know, they were spending all this money on marketing Super Bowl ads and crazy parties in the city, and all of a sudden the CEO’s are saying “We’re not going to give you any more money until you start getting serious.” So all these marketers start turning to search. They started discovering search and I think that is when this industry really got its engine started and started growing. So our business actually started taking off from there,”

Monte:-“And when was this? Still in 1999?”

Noel:-“Well the difference in March 2000, when the NASDAQ crashed and everybody thought the sky was falling and it seemed like it was, but we had a few really great clients that really stuck to us and our motto from that point on really became you know ‘When the stuff hits the fan like this or in any situation but especially this one, Focus on your existing customers.” And that became the first big lesson that we learned. You shouldn’t worry about going out there and getting new business until you know that your current customers are satisfied and they’re happy. Because that always becomes your best source of referral.

Monte:-“Yeah, definitely.”

Noel:-“When your customers are saying great things about you, that was how we continued to grow our business. By word-of-mouth and referral.

Monte:-“ Yeah its similar because, when we ended up selling two big domain names, right at the end of 1999, and everything was flying and then of course the bottom falls out. And it’s so similar because what happened was because the markets crashing and everyone like oh it’s dot com, the dot com industry is crashing. It happened to be the time when we really put our noses to the grindstone and, and those businesses that were going out of business happened to be the brands and the domains that we helped sell. They were the last remaining assets for these companies. So, it kept us alive during that time as well.”

Noel:-“Yes, that’s right you know. There was a lot of that kind of activity for us as well. I remember one of our biggest clients, it’s kind of strange, but one of our best clients ties a permanent intake, ended up buying all of the assets of WebVan, when those guys went, belly up. And that may seem very weird but WebVan had built a rather sophisticated inventory management system in this very high tech warehouse over in the East Bay of San Francisco. Which of course is where Kiaser is based. They were our client and what ended up happening was they said ‘We’ve got 75 domain names that these guys own and we don’t know what to do with them. So we helped them to start managing those. We did asset valuations on all those domain names so that they could put those on the books as assets and in some cases, give them away as charitable donations when they needed to. So these guys knew. So we had WebVan.com and Homegrocer.com so we had all these great domain names. So even we kind of benefited from that as well.