Will Schroter

And so over the ensuing, I'm trying to get my dates right, call it eight years, give or take, we worked on a whole bunch of different ideas.

Somewhere along the way, a few years into it, up until this point, I'm funding each of these ideas myself.

And these are all SaaS companies.

And this new thing had just been introduced to the market called performance advertising.

Pay-per-click.

Actually, funny I mentioned them.

Bill Gross invented, sold it to Yahoo, and then Google stole.

was a new thing.

So you could all of a sudden, for the first time, spend money hundreds of dollars at a time to see if things worked and then put gas on them.

Up until then, you couldn't do it.

There was affiliate marketing, which is kind of an interesting thing now, but it was actually a big thing back then, but also performance-based.

And so all of a sudden, you could build these ideas, do customer acquisition for thousands of dollars, and then if it worked, pour more gas on it.

Up until that point, that never existed.

You had to spend huge amounts of money on servers and banner ads and all this stuff that was incredibly inefficient and then hope that massive bet paid off.

So I was at kind of the dawn of building companies that could scale on small amounts of dollars.

And I thought that was a big thing.

And I wanted to build as many as possible.

Boy, I'm trying to think back.

I would say, like I'm thinking in one company, I put like a quarter million bucks.

Another one, I probably put a thousand.