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Here’s the program.
Andrew Warner: Hi, everybody. I’m Andrew Warner, and I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Yeah, there you go. Home of the ambitious upstart.
Wouldn’t you agree that the only way you can get a complete understanding of business is if you study both the success and the failures? Well, one aspect of the Mixergy community that I love and am grateful for is the fact that entrepreneurs are willing to come her e and talk openly about their setbacks.
Joining me is Sebastian Replanski who launched Search-to-Phone in 2005 and had to close it in 2008. He’ll tell you what he learned from that experience. Search-to-Phone was a business that offered mobile search via phone and was backed by investment from TechStars. Sebastian, welcome to Mixergy.
Sebastian Replanski: Thank you.
Andrew: Search-to-Phone wasn’t the first business that you started. Can you tell me about the company you launched before that and then we’ll work our way to Search-to-Phone and then finally, we’ll find out what you’re going to do next because I know you’ve got a great project that you’re working on. So what were you doing just before that?
Sebastian: Before that I had a consulting firm called Bellasoft [sp] Consulting. It was basically a boutique consulting firm, which had, at the highest time, you only had one very successful client in New York City, a company called Box. Box did all the retouching for the top magazines. If you take a look at Vanity Fair, at Vogue, W Magazine, all those beautiful pictures come from a master retoucher and a genius. His name was Pascal Dangin and he basically owned Box Studios in New York City. He was my main client back then.
Andrew: Okay. How well did that business do?
Sebastian: It did pretty well. At one point, I had $100,000 in the bank. I was 24, I believe. I had a boat in New York City. I had a house in Florida on the beach. So, it did pretty well.
Andrew: Why did that business do so well?
Sebastian: Good clients, I guess. He was a good businessman and I provided everything that they needed. It did really well.
Andrew: So, you’re 24 years old, as you told me in the pre-interview. You had a cash cow that was doing well. Why stop that and then shift over to a whole new business?
Sebastian: That’s a very good question. It was exactly that. I was feeling very comfortable. I had more money than I could spend and I was at my prime as a developer. I said, “I have to do something better than this.”
So me and my client, Pascal, we started a business. It was a business about doing photo retouching software. We spent about two years, maybe three years, developing that and it was a fantastic system. He was a visionary and he saw it coming. But one day, Apple launched something called Aperture, which was exactly the same thing, although it was done by Apple, so much, much nicer than what we could ever do with just two people working on it. When I saw that, I said, “I have to move on. I have to call it a loss and move on.”
Andrew: OK. Where did the idea for Search-to-Phone come from?
Sebastian: Me and my co-founder, Carmin Turco were sitting having a Corona one day when I was babysitting my one and a half year old baby. He had a boutique business where he used to buy AdWords on Google and send traffic to his clients, which were mostly accounting software firms. So he was kind of in the middle and sending traffic. He told me, “You know Sebastian, they don’t care about clicks. They want the phone to ring for sales.” So that’s when Search-to-Phone came to life. We were having a beer and boom.
Andrew: How were you going to make those phones ring for his clients? What was the original vision? I want to understand that original vision and then how…
Sebastian: I had the house in Florida and I used a service called ServiceMagic, which in the future, once we get to the interview on Search-to-Phone, they became our number one client and only client. So anyway, I have a house in Florida and I was looking for, I think, kitchen renovations. I was wanting to renovate my kitchen. I had to go to ServiceMagic, fill out three pages worth of forms, tell them everything that I had to do and then three or four days later I got e-mails from potential contractors. So that idea mixed with his idea of sending clicks became to Search-to-Phone.
Andrew: In the business mode, what was the original model? How would a user find you? How would they interact with Search-to-Phone and then how would they get sent over to the client?
Sebastian: Carmin is the pitch man. He used to give this pitch, but basically, Search-to-Phone worked like this. You’re looking for something, so you call Search-to-Phone, the 1-800 number, or you use the web interface instead.
Let me give an example, “Hey, I’m looking for a plumber to come to Clearwater, Florida to fix a leaking collar sink today at six.” Something very specific. Search-to-Phone will take that recording and broadcast it out by using, I think at the moment we use Yahoo Local search to find contractors within a five mile radius and you will call everybody at the same time, broadcast your search and if, and only if, they’re able to help you, they will press one and we will connect you back to the user.
So the business model was we were going to charge those contractors five dollars, a dollar, we experimented with many different pricing models and it was depending on the category. Some people, plumbers, maybe, will need to pay ten bucks, something more expensive, people are willing to pay $75 or more. So that was in essence the elevator pitch for Search-to-Phone.
Andrew: You know what? That makes a lot of sense to me. As I’m listening to it right now, I say, “That makes a lot of sense. You can build that today.”
Sebastian: I know. Every time I pitch the idea to somebody, it’s fantastic, but there are a number of problems with . . .
Andrew: Let’s hold off on the problems. Let’s let the story unfold. I want to hold off and I want people to understand the problems. I’m going to write a note here to make sure I let you finish that thought.
Were you going to charge all of the… If you didn’t have a plumber who was signed up in the neighborhood where I called up to the service, you would just call up all the plumbers locally anyway, right? The fee would only go to the plumber who wanted priority, a first shot at those calls.
Sebastian: Yeah. If you register with us, we’ll call you first. We called those Premium Providers. And then we go out to the open yellow pages. At the moment we use Yahoo Local search and we just basically take everybody and call everybody.
Andrew: Okay.
Sebastian: Basically, if you’re a plumber, to keep the example going, you will pick up the phone and you will hear the person’s voice, so it sounded like it was a real person. So you will hear that and then you will hear, “This call is brought to you by Search-to-Phone. If you can help this person, press one.” Boom.
Andrew: Okay. I don’t want to get too deep into the details of it, but how did your system know whether I was looking for a plumber or a locksmith or someone else?
Sebastian: When you call in, you have to select the category and if you were on the web interface, it was much easier, you just select.
Andrew: Okay. So you guys are having a beer, you have an idea that eventually fleshes itself out and becomes this idea that you just described. What’s the first thing that you do once you decide that you want to investigate a business here?
Sebastian: The first thing we did was, back then I was big on patents, so the first thing we did is we started researching patents and me and Carmin started writing our own patent. We spent about the first two weeks doing research and drawing up the patent application. We filed for a provisional patent first, just for ourselves, and then we decided to get some money together and actually pay a lawyer to do it right.
Andrew: How much does it cost to get a patent put together?
Sebastian: It’s hundreds of thousands, but we didn’t spend that much. I think we spent between $20,000 and $30,000.
Andrew: And this is still at the stage where you’re spending your own money on it, right?
Sebastian: Yeah. It was completely strapped. I think Carmin spent his inheritance and I mortgaged my house and all my savings and we started doing this. Not only did we go for patents, but soon after that we started, even without having a product, we did the wrong thing, we hired a business development firm in New York and we were paying them $15,000 a month for them to create a business for us.
Andrew: And what does it mean that they create a business for you for this?
Sebastian: They started calling people doing business development. They basically got us a whole bunch of interviews with eBay, Skype, I think AOL, a whole bunch of interviews with them. But we had no product, we had no sales, we had no revenue and we’re spending our money to get interviews. In retrospect, that was useless. The patent was useless. The business development firm was useless. We should have spent the effort in what Eric Rice and all the leading startup people are telling you now. Get a product and get it out there as soon as possible and see if it works or not.
Andrew: I didn’t even know that there were business development firms out there like that, that would just call up the companies that you want to work with or that they think you should work with, get you a conversation with them and the idea is that you say, “Hey, we’re building this product. Tell us what you’re looking for. Let’s see if we can find a partnership together. Maybe somebody comes to eBay and isn’t just looking for an iPad holder, but is looking a plumber. We want you to send that person to us and we’ll take care of them.” That’s the kind of conversation you were hoping that they would put together for you?
Sebastian: Right.
Andrew: So that’s the second thing that you do. What else do you do before you… What else do you do in the early days?
Sebastian: I started coding that in the early hours in the morning before going to my client, I start building this from scratch. I’m a super coder. With Bellasoft, I did 350,000 lines of code in a few months. I started coding this. I had no idea how to put this together. I had to go out and learn VoIP, which back then was in its infancy. I started putting a prototype and within a month or two, I think we had something going where we started getting calls through the system. We used Carmin’s existing clientele to start testing this out and it was working.
I think then we put the demo together and people go there, put their phone number, the phone rings and wow. It’s not a web app. It’s something that calls you. Back then there was nothing like that. It was pretty cool to interface the web with the phone.
Andrew: Even to this day, the founder of Twilio told me that when a developer builds a program that works with the phone and shows it to their boss or anyone, they think it’s magic because it’s like the web magically made stuff in their life make noise and interacted with them. You said you built it in a couple months. What did that first version look like that you built in a couple of months.
Sebastian: It was a form. In the first version, we didn’t have you record the real message. It was a form that you would, like, plumber you would select the hours, you would select the problem. We basically pre-recorded those phrases, so the plumber will get this person is looking for this at this time until one of the guys at this development firm… It wasn’t a complete waste of money.
One of the guys who was very smart there told us, “Hey, why don’t you just record the message.” And we’re like, “Oh wow, that’s a pretty good idea.” And immediately, our take rates went up the roof when we started recording with the user’s voice exactly what they want.
Andrew: What’s the name of this business development firm?
Sebastian: Schlossberg:Flynn
Andrew: Schlossberg:Flynn?
Sebastian: I think it’s owned by Schlossberg, he’s a famous artist. It’s S:F.
Andrew: And what did they charge you?
Sebastian: It was something like either $12,000 a month as a retainer. I think we [??] them for a few months and I think we gave them a little bit of equity too.
Andrew: Really? Eric Rice I think would have taken a little bit of equity and not taken the monthly fees.
Sebastian: I know.
Andrew: I actually don’t know how he does business, but I do know that he’s an advisor to a few past Mixergy interviewees.
So that make sense. That simple form that you created, that’s a minimum viable product. You built it in a couple months, you had it actually make phones ring and you figured it all out yourself and you did the development yourself. You said earlier that you had people actually use the system. Who was it who was filling out the form? How did you get people to fill out the form?
Sebastian: I think we were buying clicks, AdWords clicks, at the beginning.
Sebastian: OK, so I would type in “plumber” into Google or some phrase like that, probably not exactly “plumber” because it’s an expensive phrase. You bought the ad that sent traffic to the form. That’s pretty expensive. Do you remember how much you were spending on that?
Sebastian: Like $5 or $6 per click. Carmin did all that because he was in the business of buying clicks to begin with, so he had the expertise to do that.
Andrew: Do you remember what the conversion rates on that were?
Sebastian: I don’t remember, no.
Andrew: What you were doing still makes sense to me. You built the test program. You wanted to see if anyone would even interact with it. Sure enough, they did to some degree. You had a product up and running. You said that Carmin brought in his clients. How did he bring in his clients?
Sebastian: I think he started marketing to the same target audience. I think back then he was selling 90, almost 100 accounting products, so he started buying clicks for that and to his existing clientele, we would send a phone call. I think we registered… I think only one person actually paid for it.
Andrew: What was it MAS 90? MAS 200?
Sebastian: Yeah, it’s called MAS 90 and I think it’s an accounting software.
Andrew: Oh, gotcha. OK. So he was selling this accounting software and people who use this particular accounting software, I guess are small business people who made for good potential customers. So right now, you’re spending more money than, looking back, you probably should have, but you’re on track, you’re getting positive feedback, you’re making some progress. What’s the next thing that you do?
Sebastian: It’s a good question. I don’t know. We kept on burning our own money and the problem that we had is that every visitor, not only cost us money for the click, but he also cost us money because we’re making 50 phone calls for this person and we have no way to monetize. We had many ideas about how to monetize it, but it’s very hard. Somebody at the other end is getting these phone calls. It’s a cold call. They don’t know who the hell Search-to-Phone is, much less why is this person, sounds like a live person, but it’s not live.
So we have no way to monetize it. We tested getting credit card number entered by the phone, but that’s too hard. We told them we were going to charge them, but we didn’t. We were basically experimenting with, “Hey, press one and you will pay using your telephone bill.” We were telling them all these things, but we had no way to actually do it without getting into heavy licensing deals with the phone companies to get them to charge.
Andrew: Sebastian, I’ve got to say again, that makes sense too. Why spend time working out relationships with the phone company where they will bill the plumbers and everyone else that you’re hoping to work with? Why spend time building that out unless you know for sure that people want to use it?
So you said, we’ll say “If you want to pay by credit card, press one. If you want to pay by your phone company to get this lead, press two” and so on. You’re counting up how many people are pressing two or so on and however way you’re testing this out. But basically, you’re getting feedback to see what’s the most popular solution and what you’re telling me though is none of those solutions were working. None of those solutions were so encouraging that you’d have to go and build them out, right?
Sebastian: Correct. I think from experience now I can tell you that it’s hard to change people’s behaviors and we were trying to do something completely different. There was no market for Search-to-Phone and it was very early. That’s my take now looking in retrospect. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s a completely new different behavior. From the user perspective and from the merchant perspective, it’s new.
Andrew: So now at this stage, the answer is to say we have to stop the business. We were asking the market whether they wanted this bad enough to pay in the format that we had available to them. They were saying no, they did not want to pay using the system we put out there. At this point, looking back, that’s an early alarm, right?
Sebastian: Yeah. Not only that… Yes, you’re completely correct, but me and Carmin, at that point, even though the initial idea and the whole… It was called Project Sophia, because my daughter was named Sophia. We basically wanted a business to run on its own and make us money, enough for us to live.
But soon enough, the more that we talked to people, everybody, just like your reaction, “Wow, that’s a great idea!” We said, “Hey, let’s sell this to AT&T or let’s sell this to Verizon.” Even before having a product, we’re on the road, flying on our money to talk to AT&T, to talk to Verizon and trying to sell them this.
Andrew: Sell them the business?
Sebastian: Sell them the business, yeah. We were going to flip it for millions.
Andrew: What was their feedback on that? What did they say?
Sebastian: We were in a room full of Verizon employees. We were pitching to the 411 directory assistance, which is, as you may know, is a cash cow for them. This is back before Google had the free 411, back before free versions of the 411. They have this 411 system and they have real operators that are looking up phone numbers. It costs them money. So Search-to-Phone could do all this automatically behind the scenes and still be a cash cow for them, so we wanted to sell it to them.
Their reaction was… Me and Carmin had this prototype glued together that barely worked and we were there in a room and Carmin takes out his phone and dials into Search-to-Phone and says, “Hey, I’m looking for flowers. I’m in New York City.” Before the meeting we were debating, should we rig it? Should we have your brother pick up the phone and be a florist? Or should we just let fate take its course and be real? So we were debating for this like a whole day and finally said, hey, let’s go in the meeting, let’s do the Search-to-Phone demo, let’s let it do its magic.
So Carmin is there. The room is full of Verizon executives and a florist picks up the phone and she’s trying to sell Carmin. “I got your flowers right here. I can deliver them right now.”
“Oh no, it’s OK, it’s OK.”
And he’s trying to get off the phone, but everybody, their mouth dropped. It worked. For a specific keyword, flowers, it worked. They’re excited but nothing happens out of it because they eventually figured out it’s just two guys and we didn’t really have a whole product.
Andrew: I see. OK, that makes sense. But walking in there, weren’t you afraid that you would give them this idea and they would just run with and say, “We have all these engineers, just sitting back there waiting to come up with the next cash cow, the next 411. You coming and telling us about an idea we didn’t come up with, we’ll toss them on this and have them solve it.”
Sebastian: Well, we had the patent going, so we thought we were safe because we had the patent going. Before we did anything, we filed for a patent, before we actually wrote our first line of code. But I knew enough to know that that doesn’t matter. However, I knew this, not from experience, but large companies move very slowly. Their engineers are already behind on current projects, never mind jumping on something new. At least, most of those telecom companies are very like that. They don’t jump on new ideas quickly enough, I think.
Andrew: Before we continue with the story, I’ve gotta ask a personal question, Sebastian. Were you married at the time?
Sebastian: Yeah.
Andrew: What did your wife think about you mortgaging the house and trying to do this?
Sebastian: Back then, she kind of believed in me. She’s from Cuba. She doesn’t know about entrepreneurial ship or credit cards or things like that. She believes in you gotta work and to this day, the reason I’m going to keep on trying and keep on trying, it’s to prove her wrong.
Andrew: Really?
Sebastian: Yeah, to say, hey, you know it can happen. A kid can come out of nowhere and become a millionaire.
Andrew: Do you think deep inside that she does believe it or do you think deep inside she loves you and she’s going to go along with what you do and let you do your crazy thing?
Sebastian: I don’t know, Andrew.
Andrew: You don’t know.
Sebastian: Who can understand what women think.
Andrew: I’m sorry?
Sebastian: Who can really know what women think.
Andrew: You’ve got a little bit of an accent. Where are you from?
Sebastian: I’m from Argentina. I was born in Buenos Aires. First, I moved to Canada when I was 16 and soon after I graduated, I moved to Florida because Canada is too cold.
Andrew: I spent a large part of last year in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. I feel that there’s a lot of entrepreneurship there. Is that culturally . . . just as your wife coming from Cuba doesn’t have the cultural mindset that leads toward entrepreneurship, do you feel that you got yours from being in Buenos Aires?
Sebastian: Yeah. In fact, before I was 16, I already had two companies. I had a disc jockey company. I had business cards when I was 12. I was doing bar mitzvahs and whatever, birthday parties. I had a disc jockey company. So yeah, a lot of people are entrepreneurs back there.
Andrew: What else beyond the disc jockey company? And we’ll continue with the story, but I’m curious about your background.
Sebastian: I helped my friend Johan. Back in the ’80s, Commodore 64 was, as you know, the thing to have. It was fully of games. There was no Atari. He used to take trips to Miami, come back to Argentina full of games and we’d copy them and bootleg them and sold them. It was mostly his business. I helped.
Andrew: I still tell my friends right now, if they want to go to Buenos Aires for free, the thing to do is to by an iPad or an iPhone or whatever happens to be the latest thing. Just take it with you on the plane and if you’re an American a Canadian or from anywhere in the West, they’ll let you through with it and then sell it there on MercadoLibre or sell it to a few friends. The profit you’ll make will more than cover for your trip.
Sebastian: If you want, we can set up the next startup. It’s going to be that import-export.
Andrew: All right. I like the idea. So let’s continue now with the story. You have this idea. You started to stitch something together. You’re going into AT&T, you’re talking to other people. What’s the next step?
Sebastian: The next step, we’re pretty much ready to quit. We had no money. My wife is a doctor so she was going through residency. We are now no longer in New York City, no longer in Tampa, Florida. We’re now going to El Paso, Texas because that’s where her residency happened to be so I sell my home, we go there. We’re pretty much running out of money and then Carmin, through a friend, learns about TechStars. We apply and TechStars calls us. We almost didn’t make it. I’ll tell you the story if you’re interested.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Tell me. Well first of all, I guess everyone in the audience knows what TechStars is, but I’ll say again it’s a company that invests in startups. They take a small percentage, I think you guys got $15,000 and they took five percent of your business and it’s an accelerator firm. I can’t imagine anyone in my audience doesn’t know about it, but I should give them some background just in case.
Sebastian: Yeah. TechStars is amazing. It’s $5,000 per founder. We had two, so we got $10,000.
Andrew: Tell me the story of how you got into TechStars.
Sebastian: We almost didn’t get into TechStars. So Carmin applies and David Cohen, who’s the person who runs it, he calls everybody and, of course, I had a family, I have a house, I’m in Texas and I have a daughter. He wants everybody to move to Boulder for the summer. So Carmin, no problem, he’s by himself, he’s there. But David talks to me and kind of gathers that, hmmm, this guy’s not going to come.
But I told him, no look, I go there (and I did go there) by bus (which I did) and I’ll be part of the program. So, he doesn’t believe me and we didn’t make it. We were number 11. So he loves the idea, like many people do, but we didn’t make it. We get our letter saying, “Sorry, you didn’t make it to TechStars.” Now, luckily, or unluckily for the team that didn’t make it, team number 10 could not get visa to come to the U.S. to be part of TechStars, so David says, “Guess what? I have a spot and you’re in.”
Andrew: All right. So you get in. I’ve got to tell people, if you’re rejected from TechStars, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the process. You’re not the first entrepreneur who told me that we didn’t get in the first round, somebody else couldn’t make it or didn’t live up to expectations or otherwise didn’t take their spot and I got an opportunity. I sometimes wonder if David Cohen kind of does that just to make you feel like you got to come in here and bust your ass in order to live up to this expectation, in order to earn what I just gave you.
Sebastian: Yeah, exactly. They’re amazing.
Andrew: Okay, why? What did you get out of TechStars?
Sebastian: A lot. It’s a boot camp. You go there and many things that you get. First of all, they get you working with mentors. We got a mentor which was amazing. He actually was in the telecom business. He runs a company called Gold Systems.
Andrew: Who is he?
Sebastian: Oh, wow. His name is Gold. Terry Gold. Terry is an amazing human being. He has been coaching us, mostly Carmin because they get along. They’re both musicians at heart, so they get along. Terry was the mentor to have. He guide us through so many things. And on top of that, you’re exposed with ten other entrepreneurs trying to do the same thing as you. We were kind of different because we were not a web 2.0 company. We didn’t have the cool Ajax web thing. We were like a telephone. So were kind of different. Oops.
Andrew: Here, your camera’s going to come back on. There it is. I think that happened because I went to goldsys.com to check out who Terry Gold is and I see him there.
Sebastian: Check him out. He’s a great company.
Andrew: What kind of advice did he give you? I’m curious about how the mentors and TechStars helped shape your business.
Sebastian: He mentors mostly about business and about don’t give up, don’t go after the big telcos, stuff like that. It was kind of weird because we were all open source and Linux and were using open source product and he’s kind of like using Microsoft products. So he couldn’t really use it. He couldn’t, legally, or whatnot. He’s been up and down the road. People who are part of TechStars invested in his company. He almost lost it. It was tough economic times. But he lived through all that and I think he says on his blog, “I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 15 years and I’ve been [??] at it.” So just having him there and telling us not to quit gave us the inspiration to move on.
Now let me tell you something, $10,000, for us, was very little money. I used to burn $7,000 a month just to keep a house and the kids and diapers are expensive.
Andrew: So it wasn’t for that. It was for the mentorship and it was the introduction to investors that potentially comes after the program’s over.
Sebastian: Yeah. Carmin took the show. At the end of TechStars, you have what’s called Demo Day and people and companies and investors from many places come. They’re all flying to Boulder and you do the demo and you’ve got, I think, three minutes to do the demo. Carmin’s demo was amazing. It was probably the coolest thing and you can actually find it online and you can see it. So that alone was worth it.
Andrew: I understand what you walked into TechStars with. What I’m curious about now is what was the product like on Demo Day? I want to see how the three months at TechStars helped shape what you created. What did it look like when Carmin presented it?
Sebastian: Again, I think with David Cohen, we can kind of argued with the idea of do we do it live? Do we actually have a live call? And we don’t want another experience with a little old lady trying to sell us flowers so we decided to game it a little bit. We basically got, how was it . . . you’ve got to look at the video. We’ll send you a link and you can see it, but we basically are trying to find an Elvis impersonator to come to Demo Day to entertain the people during the break. So Carmin shows the call of what we did the day before and the demo is over and Elvis comes through the door and he’s like, “Hey, everybody” and he starts singing. Basically, we used Search-to-Phone the day before to find an Elvis impersonator and we actually paid him and we used our own money. David was supposed to [xx], but I don’t think he did.
Andrew: That’s clever because you’re not rigging it. You’re showing that it works, but you’re showing it on video tape, so if it doesn’t work you can always edit and come back with a better product.
Sebastian: No, no, no. I’m sorry. Elvis showed up.
Andrew: And the day of, you’re giving people Elvis, something tangible that they can see the results.
Sebastian: Yes and it was a great time and everybody goes meet Elvis.
Andrew: Now that’s the presentation. How did the product itself change over the three months that you were there with the mentorship, with the guidance and the inspiration of having all those other entrepreneurs around?
Sebastian: I rewrote the whole thing from scratch again. I had to start from fresh code base. I did it so that it scales. I changed from Asterisk, which was the backend system, to something new called FreeSWITCH. We changed everything.
The product, from the user’s perspective, does not change much, but the TechStars people and the mentors start getting us other business ideas. Why don’t you charge the users instead of the merchants? And then we start to discover that we have a real problem. How are we going to charge for it? Who’s going to pay for it?
Andrew: And how do you solve that?
Sebastian: We didn’t, and that’s a reason why, to this day, Search-to-Phone is totally not even online anymore. It’s because it costs money to operate. You gotta make all those phone calls. They charge you by the minute and it’s very hard to monetize. I always said it, this works if you’re a telco or you’re a big player like Google or Yahoo or something like that where you have the money to pay for the VoIP and have the infrastructure behind the scenes to go and collect from these merchants.
Andrew: And you need to be able to give the merchants enough business that they could expect more repeat business coming back.
Sebastian: If you’re some sort of merchant, you want the phone calls. You want the phone to ring. But some people are not set up for that. Best Buy is not, for example. If you’re looking for an iPod, who’s going to pick up the phone in Best Buy? So there are multiple problems. It only works for certain categories. So how do we filter that out? How do we go and collect the money? All that stuff, those are problems that the product had that we, as two people, and with little funding, could not solve back then. Hence, that’s why we were trying to flip it to the big companies.
Andrew: Do you think that walking into the program that David Cohen had an idea for how he could help shape this? Or do you think that, on the other hand, he said, “No, I don’t know how we’ll make money on this, but within the program, we’ll figure something out.”? Do you think that’s what it was? Or do you think he was saying we’ll sell it? What do you think?
Sebastian: Back then, he was basically focusing on, hey, you gotta go and get a customer, which we did. Toward the end, we got a pilot with ServiceMagic, which was actually full circle back to how I got the idea with Carmin was let’s use that. So we got a pilot with ServiceMagic and they love it because they are all about contractors. I don’t know a single contractor who doesn’t want their phone to ring. They’re not on Twitter. They’re not on Facebook. They’re on the roof with their phone. Right? They want the phone to ring, so it was beautiful for them. It was perfect.
Andrew: And ServiceMagic is great because they have multiple services that they’ll give you. I think they might have started with maid service, but they added and added and added and they’re also great because they’re national, so you know that you’ll someone with service magic anywhere in the country.
Sebastian: This was perfect for them. When we get the pilot with them, in our head, we’ve already sold it. They’re going to use it. So we developed… So TechStars ends and we raise a seed round of financing. Out of everybody who was there, I think everybody got… Most of all the companies, the ones that didn’t cease to exist, most of them raised money. That’s why TechStars is so great, because you’re exposed to all of these angel investors. After the program is over, if your thing is good and you’re a good founder, you’re pretty much guaranteed you’re going to get some money.
So we got a seed round of financing, which wasn’t enough. As I told you before, we burn through $7,000-$8,000 a month and there’s only two of us. But I did a lot of the coding, in fact most of the coding, I did by myself, so we had very little outside people. However, we had very little money. We were the only company that raised half of what everybody else raised. So we have a window of opportunity. I needed a job because I have a family, so we have only, I think, four or five months worth of money to burn through. And we have a chance with ServiceMagic. They say, OK, let’s do a pilot.
Andrew: This is what I saw in my research. A quarter of a million dollars I think I read that you raised?
Sebastian: No. We raised $150,000.
Andrew: You raised $150,000?
Sebastian: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: I see. Okay. The least of anyone in that TechStars company. Why? What was the feedback you were getting from investors?
Sebastian: I don’t know. We didn’t stop to think about that.
Andrew: Okay. And who was…
Sebastian: Maybe because it wasn’t web 2.0. It sounds great, but it wasn’t like… I don’t think that people believed it’s going to be big thing, you know? So I don’t know.
Andrew: Okay. Who were the investors?
Sebastian: Brad Feld was one of them. David was one of them. We had a whole family that invested with us, which were great. Again, just like TechStars, we almost didn’t make it because we had to fill the round. I think everybody gave you between $20,000 and $25,000 and you had to be what’s called an accredited investor, which means you have to have millions in the bank. So we’re about not to get the last spot filled and, boom, Carmin goes South with this family and they fill the round.
Andrew: And it’s a family friend? Or it’s a family that you guys met through TechStars?
Sebastian: It was through TechStars and they were the last people. I think Carmin told me he was on the floor kneeling down with his laptop doing the demo and magic happens and we get the round filled.
Andrew: Wow. Okay. You know what, I hear that a lot too, that it looks like, at the very least, and I could be wrong about this, but this is all from the anecdotes that I’m getting from interviews. At the very least, Brad Feld and David Cohen will invest in a TechStars company and they’re the two guys that are backing TechStars.
Sebastian: Yeah, but they gotta believe in you and you gotta . . .
Andrew: So it’s not like you walk in the door and they hand you an extra $25,000 each, right?
Sebastian: Like that.
Andrew: So you get ServiceMagic. What happens then?
Sebastian: Let me refresh my memory. We get them as a pilot. No promises asked. We get to talk to the guy who runs the tech operations over there and we kind of become like a lab for them. They’re not sure if they want to call people yet, but let’s do a pilot they say. So we basically stop working on Search-to-Phone proper and we shift gears and start working on something for ServiceMagic, something to call their contractors. I think they wanted to get more contractors in a specific area of the country where they have nothing, or they have very little. So we focus on a product for them.
And then we start switching . . . and I’ve done this many times in my life. Instead of solving a problem, why don’t we create a system to solve a general problem. So we start developing a library and a platform. Instead of just doing Search-to-Phone, we create a telephony platform to do all sorts of cool things. You can draw the design of what the call through will look like and behind the scenes, this thing does it for you. So I spent most of my time programming that and also working on the pilot for them.
Andrew: By platform, it sounds like you created something like Twilio.
Sebastian: Yeah and I told David back then, “Look, this is exactly like Twilio.” But we missed the boat. We were focusing on the wrong things. So now, instead of focusing on a big problem for user facing, we end up spending all our time and our effort and our money in a single customer to do a single pilot for them.
Andrew: And so, did you… Maybe I’m a little slow here. I want to make sure I understand this. You created a big platform and you created the small product for the client?
Sebastian: Yeah. We crated the platform to solve any problem with telephony and applied it to just one single customer.
Andrew: I see. It’s almost like having a customer come and ask you to tighten a screw and you decide that you’re going to build a whole toolbox.
Sebastian: Exactly.
Andrew: Which happens to have the Phillip’s screwdriver in it. That’s the issue.
Sebastian: Exactly.
Andrew: All right. What was the response from ServiceMagic? How did the ServiceMagic test go?
Sebastian: They told us, “You gotta stop this because we can’t take any more calls.” The call center was full. It was unbelievable.
Andrew: You flooded their call center?
Sebastian: Yeah. We flooded the call center, plus they ask us to send them an e-mail every time they got a new lead and they just couldn’t keep up. It’s supposed to be a live thing and they were three days behind processing the calls to sign up new contractors. Basically, the pilot was, we’re gonna call an area of the country where ServiceMagic had no contractors in that area, or very little, and we start sending them free calls and say, “Hi, this call is brought to you by ServiceMagic.” Boom. And then we give them the client.
Andrew: How did you get so many clients?
Sebastian: We were using their traffic. They put us in their homepage or whatever. So they have a budget, right? They buy traffic from Google and other sources and they were sending these clients, and I think they were beta testing this, so a certain number of users searching for a plumber, I don’t know, in that part of the country, will get the Search-to-Phone popup.
Hey, put your phone number and we call that client. They’ve recorded the message and out goes the ServiceMagic pilot to basically call all these people, all the plumbers or all the roofers, whatever. So they’re getting in way, way much traffic than they can hold, they can answer.
Andrew: Now I’m listening to that, and to me that sounds like good news. Leads are great for companies like ServiceMagic. Why was that an issue?
Sebastian: I don’t think it was an issue, per se, but they had already created… They were either, and I don’t know this, already had a product that called people or they were working on a product to call people. And to give them the benefit, I don’t know if I would, as a company the size of ServiceMagic, to hire two guys to run my phone system. So I think they kind of saw that it worked and end up doing their own thing with their own system that they already purchased before.
Andrew: I see. Okay. They just figured, hey, we’re at a point where we want to test these things, let’s give Sebastian a shot. Maybe it’ll work out and we’ll work with him. Maybe it’ll work out and we’ll go reproduce it ourselves. Maybe it’ll fail and we’ll save ourselves the time of having to implement our own solution. Who knows? Let’s give it a shot.
Sebastian: Exactly. So that was the end of it. We couldn’t close them. We couldn’t close them. We used all our money to work on that. We couldn’t finish the platform and we couldn’t finish Search-to-Phone. And it’s costing us money, so we had to shut it down.
Andrew: What was it like to shut it down?
Sebastian: It was painful, of course. And I had to go take a job. This was 2008. August. Go back and look at the picture of Dow, it looks like this. It’s the big recession. So it was awful. Me, as a serial entrepreneur who has been being an entrepreneur all this time, had to go and take a job.
Andrew: How do you come to terms with that?
Sebastian: I said, “Okay, look, you’re going to learn something at this new place.” It’s a great company. As many people know, I work for Yahoo. I try to, and I always say this, I got this from Dr. Wayne Dyer, if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. So I, instead of taking and looking at it is a failure, I said I’m going to go there, I’m going to learn some cool stuff. It’s only going to be for a year and I’m going to be back at it.
Andrew: Let me say this, too, to anyone in my audience. People expect that if you’re an entrepreneur you can never get a job. It’s not like being a Christian and suddenly worshipping, I don’t know, Allah or something or vice versa. Sometimes, when you go to work for someone, that’s when you get your greatest burst of creativity. Sometimes you end up working for a boss who inspires you. Sometimes you end up working for a company that gives you connections that you never would have had otherwise. We’re not talking about this as a religion. We’re talking about your fricking life.
And so, if you’re ever in a situation where the company doesn’t make sense and you need to back out and go get a job, the last thing I say to you is, be stubborn. I say just be open-minded. Be aware of your possibilities. Don’t be someone who’s religious about business like this. I’m glad that you said that and I see a smile on your face because it hasn’t been a terrible experience for you. That has been a good, positive experience.
Sebastian: Yeah. Yahoo’s been tremendous and it’s full of talented people. I was not even in Sunnyvale. I was in Miami, where I was taking care of the sports division for Latin America and the emerging markets and I got to work with some incredible people. Coming from a startup where I was working 18 hours a day, for me to come to work for Yahoo was like a vacation. Sending out for coffee? Cafeteria? Are you kidding me? I started in August. Yahoo has this focal process at the end of year where your manager evaluates you. All of a sudden, I’m the best guy they ever had. I’m number one for my manager. And you said it, Andrew, you get to learn a lot of things and I did.
Andrew: Tell me about the confidence. Tell me where your confidence level was before you took the job and where you confidence level was a little afterward.
Sebastian: If I don’t get Yahoo that day, that day, I had to go bankrupt because I have all these credit cards. I had bills to pay. If Yahoo didn’t come through that day, I would have been in big trouble financially.
Andrew: And what about mentally? What were you like at the time?
Sebastian: I was devastated because me and Carmin believed this was it here, we’re flipping this. So I’m there, I’m an employee, I got a management job and I don’t get to code. And the only reason that I took a management job is because that’s what they were looking for, so I became that person. I looked them straight in the eyes of my managers and said, “I’m your man. I’m going to make this happen.” And I lived to that promise and I made it happen for them.
Andrew: I’ve told people here in my past interviews that for me, when I get in situations like that, one of the ways it manifests itself is in sleepless nights. I just can’t fall asleep. I can’t relax. I can’t focus on what I need to do because I’m so worried. What about you? How did being in that situation manifest itself? What was your day? What was your night like?
Sebastian: I was extremely depressed. Lack of sleep, for sure. I was restless. I’m like, “I’m a failure.” I call all my friends and I’m like, “Look, I’m at the lowest point in my life.”
Andrew: You admit that to your friends? I wouldn’t admit it to my friends. You do?
Sebastian: Yeah.
Andrew: Why?
Sebastian: I have many, many good friends and I said, “Look, the boat has left without me and I missed it. That’s it. This is the end of it.”
Andrew: You know, that’s something that I’m not good at. Talking to my friends and saying, “Hey, I feel like a failure,” is really rough for me. What did it do for you to be able to say that to your friends?
Sebastian: They told me of course what friends will tell you, “Look, this is just a phase. You’re going to get back on your feet. You’re gonna do it. Don’t worry. I believe in you.” And all that.
Andrew: Was that helpful?
Sebastian: Very helpful.
Andrew: Okay.
Sebastian: Very helpful. After a few months, I started thinking of new things and we’ll get to that, I guess.
Andrew: Okay. So you’re at Yahoo. Things are going great for you. You now no longer have to go bankrupt. You’re now a star.
Sebastian: And another thing I forgot to mention to you, Andrew is, I was expecting a baby. Not personally, but my wife was expecting, so health insurance was at the top of my list for getting a job.
Andrew: Right. I forgot about that. Yeah, bankruptcy is not going to solve the health insurance problem. I see where you were. I see what happens here with the job at Yahoo. You’re learning, you’re growing, you’re ready to get back to entrepreneurship. At what point do you start to say, “I think I need to go back into this.”
Sebastian: Oh, no. I never…
Andrew: You always knew you would?
Sebastian: I always knew I would. I just had to find out what I was going to do next.
Andrew: Now one of the things that I notice about you, it comes across a little in your e-mail, but it comes across in the conversation that we had privately and here in the conversation –Confidence. Just confidence. Anyone who’s watching this, if they had the sound turned off, they wouldn’t think this was a guy talking about one of the big setbacks of his life. They’d think this is a guy who’s on top of the world. Where does that come from? And how do you keep that up?
Sebastian: I don’t know. In my family, it was a lot of negativity and I basically came out the opposite. Instead of thinking about the bad stuff, I’m always thinking about the good. I notice Argentina is full of… People always tell you that they are much bigger than they really are.
Andrew: I see. There’s a lot of machismo there.
Sebastian: Yes.
Andrew: I see.
Sebastian: So it’s part cultural, part my own.
Andrew: OK. We talked before the interview about whether or not you should say what you’ve got in mind for after Yahoo. What do you think? Do you want to say it?
Sebastian: Yeah. Yahoo’s almost come to an end. I’ve been part of it for a long time. I believe in the company. The company has now brought in some key management people, which I think are going to do the right thing and they’re already doing that. It’s a great company and definitely now they got the right people at the head to make it happen.
I’m on my way out because… I don’t know if you know about it, but in December they did a round of layoffs and I was given the opportunity by my manager, who has been always very good to me. A year before this he said, “Hey, you gotta move to Sunnyvale. This is where the party’s at. You can’t be in Miami. They’re going to shut that down eventually.” So I never wanted to move to California to be part of Yahoo, so I turned it down. So I’m part of that people who are laid off at the moment.
I have three more months with them, which I’m going to do my best, but I’m cooking something new. I’m cooking something called Present Online Now and it’s an idea that I got while I was at Yahoo. Everybody in the company uses Adobe Connect to do presentations and meetings. We use it day in and day out. Adobe has done a tremendous job with it and I said, “Hey, I can do a little bit better.” So I started doing my own thing.
Andrew: And the company name… Let’s give the website out.
Sebastian: It’s called Present Online Now.
Andrew: PresentOnlineNow.com. I hope everyone who’s listening to this can go check it out, give you feedback on it, can try it out. Are you ready for them to try the product?
Sebastian: Yeah. It has a few issues. I made a decision. I want this to be completely different. The way it’s different is it uses some of the technology that Adobe came… They just released something called Peer-to-Peer Technology. It’s part of the 10.1 Flash Player. So why is this so different is because it doesn’t use Flash Media Server in the backend. Everything happens on a peer-to-peer mesh.
If I’m giving a presentation to 1,000 people, traditionally, my computer is connecting to a server and the serve is sending it out 1,000 times to everybody who’s connected. If I am the owner of the service, I’m paying bandwidth for all those thousands of presentations. The business model for the presentation world right now is flat fee. You come in, you become a member, you pay $50 -$90 a month and you can do unlimited presentations. Now that’s great for me as a user, but it’s bad for them as a host because I’m paying bandwidth for every presentation you do.
So this PresentOnlineNow.com is kind of different. There are no backend servers. The whole thing is hosted on the Google cloud using the app engine. The front ends talk to each other using a peer-to-peer mesh, so there is no service in the middle. So it’s great.
For most users it works. If you’re on a modem, a cable modem a DSL or if you’re a small office, no problem. The moment the corporate IT guy puts a firewall in the middle, this peer-to-peer technology doesn’t work very well because it’s trying to block peer-to-peer communications which happen using UDP. So corporate firewalls? It doesn’t work very well.
So right now, I’m going to work on a hybrid solution where there’s going to be a server for only the people who cannot connect through the firewall. It’s going to go through that.
Andrew: I see. Okay. You don’t think that you can solve the point-to-point, peer-to-peer connection within an office behind a firewall. You think you need to have an alternate solution for them.
Sebastian: Yeah, I have to have something called hybrid where those people are going to go through a server.
Andrew: Okay. All right. So let me ask about the business model there, since one of the issues that you had before was getting the revenue. What are you thinking for revenue here?
Sebastian: I learned from my mistakes. Before, with Search-to-Phone, we were going into uncharted territory. There is no business there. We created one. This one, I took the opposite approach. Let’s go to a huge area. The business of webinars and meeting rooms is huge. There’s a lot of revenue. So I said I’m going to go there and I’m going to do it better and I’m going to come in with a disruptive pricing model.
They’re charging $90 a month, $60 a month? I’m gonna charge $15 a month or something like that. Even free. I have a free plan. I have a $15 plan. I have a $30 plan.
And I’m also giving people opportunity to have a free room. I’m doing a webinar, I don’t know if I’m going to have enough people. The moment the room fills up, you get a popup saying, “Hey, you’ve got more people waiting for you. Want to upgrade?” “Sure!” “$5”
Andrew: I like this model a lot. I’ve actually been looking at webinar software lately and I see that, like you say, it’s expensive. One of the problems with the monthly fee is, sure it’s great for someone who’s going to host 50 billion different events a month, but for someone who just wants to come in and do one, maybe a second follow-up, who has one client who needs to see his desktop and interact with a few people in his office. The problem with that is you have to pay full price. You have to pay as much as the person who’s going to do a webinar or a presentation every hour of the day that he’s in his office. And that just doesn’t make sense. There’s no entry into that for someone who’s new.
Sebastian: Absolutely right. So I said, “Screw that. You can have a monthly plan or you can pay per use.”
Andrew: And now I understand why they’re having issues, why they can’t charge me less than that, because everything’s working through their servers. And it’s not a low bandwidth service because we’re talking about, if I want to show someone my site or have a future guest show me his website and show me what could be done on it, he’s gotta broadcast his whole desktop to me or I would have to broadcast my whole desktop to them. That’s not low bandwidth. We’re talking about a lot of pixels that need to be accounted for.
Sebastian: Yeah. I wrote the whole algorithm for that and I didn’t go traditionally. I went and I did it completely different to save on bandwidth and to give you… When you share your screen, you send this thing, it looks exactly the same as your real screen looks like. And in fact, many times, I find myself clicking and I’m clicking on the presentation as opposed to the real window.
Andrew: So let’s go back and see what you learned from the past experience and then we’ll talk about one last thing about the current company. So, past experience, you said there were a lot of problems earlier. I interrupted you. I think you brought them up throughout this interview and I’ve got some notes on them, but I want to give you room here to say, “Here’s what I learned. Here are some of the problems that we experienced and what I got out of it.”
Sebastian: Many problems. First of all, if you’re a small company, you can’t be like Twitter where they went many years without a business model. You have to have a… My advice to founders is have a business model in mind and go to a place where you can start immediately making money. We had a great idea with Search-to-Phone. It still is a great idea. I think it’s early. There is no market for it yet. It’s hard to make money with it because you don’t have a business model yet that is viable. So that’s mistake number one.
Mistake number two, don’t spend your efforts into trying to fix somebody else’s business. Focus on your own. Grow your own business.
Andrew: What do you mean by somebody else’s business?
Sebastian: At the end of the road, we focused on one client, which we end up not getting and we should have been focusing on solving our other issues.
Andrew: That’s a great point. Okay. What else?
Sebastian: Let’s see. I don’t know, Andrew.
Andrew: I’ve got my notes here. As you were speaking I took notes and as you said these last points, I took notes on them. One thing you said earlier that you wish you hadn’t done, or you might not have done in retrospect is get patents. You don’t need the patent before you have the business.
Sebastian: No, you don’t need that.
Andrew: Business development. First, focus on the product and get it out there, then you can maybe hire these business development firms, if it all.
Sebastian: Yeah. You’ve gotta be lean. So the lean movement that Eric Rice and, I’m sorry, there was another interviewee that was, amazing dude. What’s his name? Hiten . . .
Andrew: Hiten Shah, yes. Well he did what you’re doing except he talked about multiple companies that failed for him.
Sebastian: That guy, he’s a guru for me. Eric is a guru for me. You have to stay lean. You have to be able to pivot and you have to do agile software that learns. You have to be able to iterate quickly, fail quickly, get it out of the way, move to the next thing.
Andrew: I see. And that’s part of why you’re comfortable telling my audience to go check out, what’s the website? I want to make sure I have the full name.
Sebastian: The name is silly because basically, I went to GoDaddy and everything I tried to get was already taken, so screw it, I end up taking whatever. The name is Present Online Now.
Andrew: Ah, there it is. So you’re sending people to PresentOnlineNow.com even though it’s not finished because this is part of the philosophy that you’ve gotten as a result of what happened to Search-to-Phone. You say put it out there, let’s let them have at it to get them to give me feedback.
Sebastian: It works but if you’re behind a firewall, sorry, can’t help you. But we will be able to help you soon.
Andrew: You say, maybe not, don’t. We shouldn’t have these hard and fast rules, but one thing that maybe you shouldn’t have done is seek partnerships before you build the product. Don’t go to AT&T’s office — and it’s impressive that you were able to get into their office — but maybe don’t go in there until you’ve got a more solid product.
Sebastian: Right.
Andrew: Is that right, actually? Do you think that today?
Sebastian: I don’t know. That was our personal experience. With Verizon and AT&T, even though I think this is right up their alley, it would have increased their revenues, they could have used it for the 411, I don’t know why we couldn’t close them. Maybe they knew, hey, you don’t have a product yet. Or maybe they foresaw that we’re going to have the same problems that you guys have. I don’t know.
Andrew: I’m reluctant to put hard and fast rules on any of this experience because the truth is that business is a little more nuanced. What I’m hoping isn’t so much to say to people, “Look, here’s a handbook of exactly what you should not do under any circumstances.” I’d much rather say, “Look, here’s a guy who’s sharing his experiences.”
You’re going to find yourself at points in your life and your business career experiencing something very similar, and at the very least, I hope you just stop and say, “Wait, are we walking in and trying to get a patent when we shouldn’t yet? Are we trying to build a whole toolbox when all we really need is a Phillips head screwdriver and we could get that quickly?” Just to stop and ask yourself a few questions and be more aware.
Business model too, “Are we trying to duplicate Twitter and Facebook’s success and trying to scale up with no revenues?” Or maybe we should stop and say, “Let’s look for the money first.”
Money is a great insulator, right? If you had revenue coming in from this business, Search-to-Phone would still be able to go until you found a solution.
Sebastian: Absolutely.
Andrew: Okay. PresentOnlineNow.com. If you thought there’s any benefit to this interview. If you got anything out of it and you want to help him out, you want to check it out, I hope you guys go and check out PresentOnlineNow.com and give some feedback to a fellow entrepreneur who did me a solid here. This is the kind of interview that I always hoped I could do. I didn’t create Mixergy to reach out to the Richard Branson’s of the world. I want to just get real conversations with people who trust me and who trust themselves enough to be as open as you were here today. And I know that when we do that, we can give an audience a lot of benefit. We can change their lives.
Sebastian: Absolutely. And hey, Verizon, AT&T, you’re still listening? You still like the idea? It’s for sale.
Andrew: It’s out there. All right. I like the way you’re talking. Sebastian, thank you very much for doing the interview.
Sebastian: You got it, Andrew. And keep up the good work. Big fun here.
Andrew: I appreciate it. Thank you guys all and if you’re in a situation where you’ve got an interesting story, just like Sebastian, do what he did. Just reach out to me, let me know what the story is and I’d love to have you on. Thank you all for watching. I’m Andrew Warner. One more time a last plug for PresentOnlineNow.com. Cool.
