Lessons learned: How I founded, bootstrapped, grew and sold my web startup
by Carl Mercier
On April 6, 2009, I gave a presentation at MeshU in Toronto, Canada. I was surprised to see how much buzz it generated on Twitter and in the blogosphere. If you missed it, here’s your chance to judge by yourself…
HD Video on iTunes (missing the last 20-25 mins unfortunately):
MeshU - Part 1
MeshU - Part 2
- A quick recap of what I said.
- And Jonathan Keebler live-blogged the event at ScribbleLive.
- My slides:
View more presentations from cmercier.
I guess this is as close as it gets to being there in person! Looking forward to your comments!
Intéressant de voir tes sites qui ont eu du succès. J’ai déjà vu Defensio sans savoir c’était quoi.
Pas mal de chose que je savais, mais c’est bon de se les rappeler!
J’imagine que je ne les sais pas VRAIMENT anyway tant que j’ai pas parti de business moi aussi…
Good job
Carl: great work on your presentation. I hope this gets around to every startup in Canada (and beyond!). A bientot!
Thanks for the kind words Julien and Leila!
Leila: I’m a big fan of Idee, so keep it up! Cheers!
[...] Carl Mercier has his piece on building and then selling his startup available in video and with slides. [...]
I was at MeshU, was a great presentation! Inspirational and educational.
Nicely done
I can’t seem to view the movies, when I click on the link they take me to the itunes store. I’m using Ubuntu and really don’t want to install itunes, can’t you put the video in open format or on Youtube!?
[...] While many Montreal startups pursued a high-risk, high-payoff strategy, Defensio successfully bootstrapped and got a nice, small exit. As founder Carl Mercier put it, “Exiting for $30M is 100 times less likely than exiting for $3M” [...]
Hi Carl,
I enjoyed your presentation videos but I have one unanswered question. Did you get into the details of how to make your service/product profitable. How did you with AjaxWhois?
I’ve followed your progress since I am a also Python programmer. Your success is really inspiring but I’d like to have more details especially on how to make my product profitable/attractive enough to be sold out like you did.
Using AjaxWhois, can you share any details? I saw you tried AdWords, and perhaps some affiliate programs. Please, what was the strategy.
Thanks for your generous and kind advice.
-Vlad
Hint: A book/bio would be your next revenue stream. =D
Vlad: I did explain how I made AjaxWhois profitable. Basically, ads is a very tough business model that basically never works. However, I found out 2 things:
- Users will click ads if they’d be stupid not to. For example, when they search for a domain name, they’re obviously looking to buy it if it’s available. By clicking my ads, they saved money (I gave them a discount) and it made their life easy because buying was just 1 click away.
- For the above to work, the ad has to fit well in the normal flow. Sidebar ads don’t really work because nobody notices them, but by sticking them in the search result made the site a lot more profitable.
But it all lies down this: Make something people need, make it easy to use with little or no barrier to entry and make sure the world knows about it. Then you have a winner.
Congrats on the WSJ coverage of Defensio!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574445502831219412.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop
Thanks for the presentation. More startups should have a look at this.
Karl A. Krogmann
Hi Carl,
I enjoyed your presentation videos but I have one unanswered question. Did you get into the details of how to make your service/product profitable. How did you with AjaxWhois?
I’ve followed your progress since I am a also Python programmer. Your success is really inspiring but I’d like to have more details especially on how to make my product profitable/attractive enough to be sold out like you did.
Using AjaxWhois, can you share any details? I saw you tried AdWords, and perhaps some affiliate programs. Please, what was the strategy.
Thanks for your generous and kind advice.
-Vlad
Hint: A book/bio would be your next revenue stream. =D