How a Developer Turned a Failing Startup into a Profitable Business

Jay Gibb is the co-founder and CEO of CloudSponge, a product that helps businesses to acquire more users via their email referral forms.

Most referral forms ask you to type in your friend's email addresses. With CloudSponge it's possible to give users access to their contacts directly from your website.

The company was founded in 2010, is self-funded and its customers include companies such as Lyft, Yelp and AirBnB.

We discuss how Jay started out with $100K and a small team to build the ‘ideal' product. They blew most of that money and still didn't have a product in market. Jay knew that he either had to quit or pivot. They needed a ‘plan B'.

So they took ONE feature from the product they were building and turned it into a standalone product. They had a crappy website up in less than a week and started charging right away. Today, that startup has an annual run rate of over $500,000 and is profitable.