Peter Coppinger, Teamwork

From Side Project to $14M ARR Bootstrap to Profitability

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Episode Summary

Peter Coppinger and his co-founder built Teamwork as a Friday side project while running a 60-hour-a-week consultancy. Their bootstrap to profitability journey started with $124 in month one and zero marketing.

Seven years later, Teamwork had 1.5 million users, $14 million in annual revenue, and 26 employees. They never took a dollar of outside investment. And they spent $765,000 on a single domain name that paid for itself within a year.

Peter Coppinger is the co-founder and CEO of Teamwork, a project management platform based in Cork, Ireland. Before Teamwork, Peter and his co-founder Daniel Mackey ran a web consultancy, building hundreds of applications for companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly. They were working 60 to 70-hour weeks and struggling to get ahead.

In 2007, they dedicated Fridays to building a project management tool to solve their own problems. They had tried Basecamp and were shocked that the market leader did not even let you put a due date on a task. So they decided to build something better.

Three months later, they launched the first version of Teamwork. The first month brought in $124. They had no marketing, no tweets, and were not even registered with Google. But someone found them and paid before the 30-day trial ended.

For the next two years, Teamwork grew alongside the consultancy. One day a week became two, then three, then weekends. Peter describes the bootstrap to profitability path as gradual but deliberate. When Teamwork revenue surpassed their consultancy income, they sold the web design business and went all in.

By the time of this interview, Teamwork had reached $8 million in ARR and was on track to hit $14 million. They had 1.5 million users, 26 employees, and had been profitable since day one of going full time on the product. Peter also reveals how spending $765,000 on the teamwork.com domain created an immediate inflection point in their growth, and why they never hired a marketing person until year six.

Topics: Bootstrapping|Product-Led Growth

Key Insight

Peter Coppinger and Daniel Mackey bootstrapped Teamwork from a one-day-a-week side project to $14M ARR and 1.5 million users without any outside investment. They stayed profitable from day one by dogfooding their own product, growing organically through referrals, and investing $765,000 in the teamwork.com domain, which paid for itself within a year.

Key Ideas

Teamwork earned $124 in its first month with zero marketing and no Google registration
The product grew from one day a week to full time over two years as SaaS revenue surpassed consultancy income
A 25% referral commission drove organic growth without a dedicated marketing hire for the first six years
Spending $765,000 on teamwork.com created a visible inflection point in the sales chart within one month
The team reached 26 employees and $8M ARR while remaining 100% self-funded and profitable

Key Lessons

🚀 Bootstrap to profitability starts with scratching your own itch: Peter built Teamwork to manage his own consultancy projects, and the features he needed matched exactly what thousands of other teams wanted, driving organic adoption.
📉 Delaying marketing hires slows bootstrap to profitability growth: Teamwork waited six years to hire its first marketing person, leaving word-of-mouth as the sole growth channel and costing at least a year of potential growth.
🛠️ Dogfooding reveals product gaps faster than user research alone: Because Peter used Teamwork daily for real client work, every slow form, missing feature, and rough edge got fixed immediately, building a product users described as technically the strongest.
💰 A premium domain can accelerate bootstrap to profitability dramatically: Teamwork spent $765,000 on teamwork.com and saw an inflection point in sales within one month, with the domain paying for itself inside a year.
🤝 Referral programs replace marketing teams in early-stage SaaS: A 25% commission referral scheme became Teamwork's primary growth engine, proving that customers who love your product will sell it for you when given the right incentive.
🎯 Gradual transition from services to SaaS reduces risk: Instead of quitting consultancy cold turkey, Peter shifted from one day a week to full time over two years, only selling the services business when product revenue surpassed it.
🧠 Competing with market leaders requires solving obvious gaps: Basecamp did not support due dates on tasks. Peter saw this gap and built a more capable alternative, proving that incumbents often leave basic needs unmet.

Chapters

00:00Introduction

00:55Peter Coppinger's background and early passion for software

02:14From college dropout to web consultancy

03:23Why Teamwork was built to solve their own problems

04:45Launching the first version and making $124 in month one

05:57Balancing customer feedback with internal roadmap

06:45Getting the first paying customer with zero marketing

07:54One day a week vs. full focus on the product

09:32The decision to turn a side project into a real business

10:51Third co-founder leaves and the one-year ultimatum

11:24Reaching $100K monthly revenue and going full time

12:53Referral program and early marketing efforts

13:44Biggest challenge - finding and hiring great developers

14:43Why Teamwork waited six years to hire a marketing person

15:19Spending $765,000 on teamwork.com

16:40Dogfooding as the secret to product quality

18:14The cost of neglecting marketing

20:22Current state - 26 employees and $14M revenue target

21:22How the domain purchase drove an inflection in growth

22:31Staying profitable and bootstrapped without investors

23:10Future plans - product suite and $100M revenue goal

24:51Lightning round

27:18Attribute of a successful entrepreneur - tenacity

27:44Productivity habits - single-tasking and email batching

28:35Transitioning from lead developer to CEO

29:21Markets and opportunities Peter would tackle next

31:45Fun fact - the office pellet gun incident

32:46Passion outside of work - traveling the world

Episode Q&A

How did Peter Coppinger bootstrap Teamwork to profitability from a consultancy side project?

Peter dedicated Fridays to building Teamwork while running a 60-hour-a-week consultancy. As SaaS revenue grew, he gradually shifted more days to the product until it surpassed consultancy income, then sold the web design business entirely.

What was Teamwork's bootstrap to profitability timeline from launch to $100K monthly revenue?

Teamwork launched in 2007 with $124 in its first month. Within two to three years, the product reached $100,000 per month in revenue, the point where Peter and Daniel knew the business was going places.

How did Teamwork get its first paying customers with no marketing?

Someone found the product organically and paid before their 30-day free trial ended, just two weeks after launch. Peter had not registered with Google, sent any tweets, or done any outreach. The product grew on the strength of its feature set alone.

Why did Peter Coppinger spend $765,000 on the teamwork.com domain?

The old domain teamworkpm.net was unmemorable and hurt branding. Peter had been trying to buy teamwork.com since 2007 when the owner wanted $20 million. The eventual purchase created an immediate inflection point in sales and paid for itself within one year.

How did Teamwork's bootstrap to profitability strategy avoid the need for outside funding?

Teamwork was profitable from the day Peter shut down the consultancy. The team funded growth from revenue, kept headcount lean at 26 people, and refused to give away equity despite knowing investment could have accelerated growth.

What referral strategy helped Teamwork grow without a marketing team?

Teamwork launched a 25% referral commission program after the first two years. Combined with a monthly newsletter that encouraged customers to share and retweet, this became their primary growth engine before hiring their first marketing person in year six.

Why did Teamwork beat Basecamp despite launching years later?

Peter and Daniel were shocked that Basecamp, the market leader, did not allow due dates on tasks. They built Teamwork to solve real project management problems from their consultancy experience, adding features like file attachments, task comments, and dependencies based on daily use.

What was Peter Coppinger's biggest mistake while bootstrapping Teamwork to profitability?

Peter says they should have allocated two or three days per week to the product instead of one. That single change could have shaved a year off their growth timeline. They also waited six years to hire a marketing person, leaving significant growth on the table.

How did Teamwork reach 1.5 million users and $14M ARR with only 26 employees?

The team stayed technical and product-focused, dogfooding their own tool daily to eliminate friction. Organic growth through referrals, word of mouth, and the teamwork.com domain purchase drove user acquisition without a large sales or marketing team.

Book Recommendations

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business

by Matt Blumberg

The Best Software Writing I

by Avram Joel Spolsky

Behind the Cloud

by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler

Links

Teamwork: Website
Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

Full Transcript

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Peter Coppinger.
Peter is the co founder and CEO of Teamwork, an online collaboration tool that allows teams to work together more efficiently.
Peter and his co founder Daniel Mackey founded the Irish based company in 2007.
And Peter and Daniel have bootstrapped the company to date and Teamwork today has almost 1.5 million users.
Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Coppinger (00:51.850)
Hi Omar.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (00:54.790)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself personally?
Who is Peter when he's not working?

Peter Coppinger (01:04.310)
Okay.
I'm originally from West Cork in the south of Ireland.
From an early age, I had a really strong interest in software development, programming.
Billy Gates was a bit of a hero of mine.
I knew that one day I wanted to get into software development, maybe make a company that would take on Microsoft.
I knew this since I was 8 years old.
So this is following my dream.
I did originally want to make games, but somehow I got sidelined into web development and here we are.
Company's going pretty good.
We're hitting about 14 million in revenue, but we're planning to grow this piece to be an absolute massive company, hopefully hitting revenues of 100 million within the next five years.

Omer (01:49.390)
All right, now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?

Peter Coppinger (01:57.150)
I think it would have to be Dream big has always been my favorite quote and it's something that has kind of inspired our efforts here.
We're really shooting for the stars of Teamwork.
PM we're not happy to rest on the world.
So I definitely would advise everyone to dream big.

Omer (02:13.710)
Great.
Now tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you started Teamwork.

Peter Coppinger (02:18.470)
All right, so I somehow fell into.
I dropped out of college as everybody does who's eager to kind of just get moving.
I couldn't wait to get my business going.
Somehow fell into website development, which in turn became application development for a lot of local companies here in Cork.
So we were doing a lot of, we did hundreds upon, maybe we probably did about 300 applications for companies like Pfizer, for Lilly, for, for a lot of medium sized companies in this region.
So that kind of gave us a good Framework like we got very good database design or application design and application development.
But for years we were kind of.
Even though we were working very hard, we were working 60, 70 hour weeks, we were really struggling to get ahead.
So we started making a couple of products.
We tried this thing to see if tag stores selling coldfusion components online.
That did okay.
Didn't do great for us.
But one day we hit upon the idea of teamwork.

Omer (03:23.110)
Can you give the audience a better understanding of what teamwork is?
Who are your target customers and what are the problems that you're trying to solve for them?

Peter Coppinger (03:31.030)
Okay.
As I said, we had hundreds of projects on the go and we had a small team of six people.
And we, we thought we were organized.
We had this big whiteboard in the office with all our projects listed and we had a meeting every Monday morning where we figured out which clients were screaming the loudest.
And we dealt with them in that order.
But we were very unorganized.
And as we started to grow our consultancy, we realized we needed a better system.
So we had heard of a couple of products out there, so we looked at the market leaders.
We tried out a couple of them.
We gave Basecamp, was the market leader at the time.
We gave Basecamp a go and we were absolutely shocked.
This is seven years ago.
We were genuinely shocked that the market leader didn't even allow you the option to put dates on tasks.
So at the time you couldn't even put a due date on a task.
And all the other products were terrible.
We said to each other, Self and my co founder Dan looked at each other and we said, we make better applications than this every single day for our clients.
Why don't we give it a go, Try and make something that will work for us, that'll solve our own problems and hopefully other people will enjoy it also.
So we put our heads down, kind of just working part time while we still were doing 60 hours a week and all the other client work.
We dedicated Fridays to working on this side project.
And three months later we released the first version of Teamwork.
And that first month we made $124, I think.
But we just.
And the first version wasn't great as it never is, but we just kept improving the product to scratch our own itch every time we needed a feature.
For example, we needed the ability to attach files to a task, just as a very convenient way of having everything you need to get the task done.
So we added that feature and then we decided we needed the ability to add comments to a task.
So that we could ask each other follow up questions.
Then we decided we needed the ability to have files on those comments.
Then we decided we needed dependencies and we just kept kind of solving our own problems.
We were very kind of technically focused and the product was just out there floating in the web with little or no marketing.
Just a very basic website that myself, my co founder, had made.
But it just started growing from there.
I think people started finding the product just by basically by trying.
A lot of people like to try every project management product out there to figure out what works for them.
And so, based on just the strength of the tech, our product started to grow.

Omer (05:57.450)
Did you go out and talk to any customers about what they were looking for, or were you guys just focused on building this for yourselves?

Peter Coppinger (06:05.130)
We, a bit of both.
We were very, very, very focused on what we needed, what we wanted.
We set up a roadmap based on our own internal needs.
And because we were still running our consultancy for the first three years, while using teamwork, we kept refining teamwork to meet our own needs, which coincidentally happened to be what our clients needed as well.
That said, though, we did always with a really strong emphasis on listening to our customers and listening to what they asked and bending over backwards to help them if they had a problem.
We added task templates, privacy based on requests from our customers.
We added mobile apps based on customer customers.
So, yeah, a kind of mixture of both.

Omer (06:44.670)
So how did you make your first $124?
Where did those customers come from?

Peter Coppinger (06:50.270)
Interestingly enough, it wasn't my mother or dad, but we have absolutely no idea.
I remember we were really surprised when we got our first payment because we hadn't even registered with Google, we hadn't put out any tweets.
We were terrible at marketing.
Somehow somebody randomly found us on the web, registered.
So from there we eventually started asking people to tweet about our product, if they like our product.
And we started kind of getting a bit better at our marketing efforts.

Omer (07:21.320)
So how long did it take from the point that you launched the first version of Teamwork to the point where you got that first paying customer?

Peter Coppinger (07:29.720)
Oh, we're the first paying customer within two weeks.

Omer (07:32.840)
Wow.

Peter Coppinger (07:33.640)
Yeah, so.
So that was interesting.
And we gave a 30 day free trial as well.
So it was interesting that somebody kind of looked at it and it obviously scratched their itch.
And they didn't bother even waiting out to trial.
They signed up straight away.
So we were pretty excited by that.
But it was a very slow trickle at the start.

Omer (07:54.290)
How much of your Resources were you putting into this product.
And if you guys are working 60 hours, you know, one of the things that I hear a lot is if you want to be successful, you have to focus, right?
You have to focus on that one thing.
But from what I'm hearing with you guys, I mean, you had the.
You had the consulting business, which was paying the bills.
You decided to dedicate one day a week to working on this.
And so looking back at that, what would you have done differently?

Peter Coppinger (08:30.570)
Yeah, you're right.
I suppose we were very cautious in getting teamwork going.
We probably, instead of going one day a week, we probably should have gotten two or three days a week, dropped a few client projects, lived on the bread line, just concentrated in getting the product going faster.
We definitely could have done a much better job with the marketing side of things.
We would have grown much faster.
We probably could have shaved a year off between where we are now and where we were then if we had.
But more of an emphasis there.
That said, we had a big kind of.
We did not.
We didn't want to drop all our existing customers or clients.
So we really wanted to kind of manage the consultancy and transition our customers over.
So what we eventually did, I think it was.
I think it was 2011, we finally sold our web design business to another company here that we really know and trust.
And we transitioned all our existing clients.
We have a lot of big multinationals and colleges here using us time.
We kind of handheld them all over to the new company who took over the web development for them.

Omer (09:31.700)
At what point did you feel that.
Well, let me just ask you just different questions.
When you started building this product, did you think, was your intention to turn this into this next business or did that happen somewhere down the line where you guys felt like, okay, no, this could actually replace the consulting business.
What was the thinking when you started building this thing?

Peter Coppinger (09:58.390)
Yeah, it was.
It was always the.
We always wanted to make products.
We somehow got wrapped up into this whole consultancy world, which is horrible.
You're never gonna earn anything more than your blood, sweat and tears.
It's nice to make a product and put it out there and while you're asleep, you know, it's earning you money.
We always knew we wanted to make a product and we had had a few stabs of kind of smaller products before that that didn't really work out.
Made our own content management system and a few other bits like that.
So.
Absolutely.
Another kind of interesting thing is that there was three co founders originally and what kind of really gave us a Kick to kind of go off and do this is that one of the guys told us that he was.
He was fed up with this hard work and he headed to Australia.
And it was at that time I turned around to my colleague Dan, seven years ago, and I said, look, we'll give this one more year or I'm going to go get a real job.

Omer (10:51.130)
He was fed up with the consulting business or the teamwork product side?

Peter Coppinger (10:55.050)
No, no, we hadn't even started the product at that stage.
It was just an idea.
But, yeah, he was just kind of fed up with this hard work doing the consultancy.
And he said he's going to go to Australia, which sounded pretty nice.
So we said, myself and Dan and I said, we give teamwork.
We really give teamwork a good crack.
Give it a year, see how it goes.

Omer (11:18.590)
So does he still have equity in the company?

Peter Coppinger (11:22.110)
No, no, we bought him out at the time.

Omer (11:23.910)
Well, going to Australia probably wasn't that nice.
All right, so you launched in 2007, and at what point did you feel like you were getting some meaningful traction here?
Like, you know, you got $124 the first month.
Then what happened?
Tell me a little bit about what happened in the next next few months.
And sort of the first year, it

Peter Coppinger (11:48.680)
was probably two years later when we had enough money coming in, teamwork was.
No, teamwork got to a point where it was making us more money than our regular consultancy.
So once that kind of happened, we were able to start stopping all the consultancy work and concentrate a lot more on teamwork.
So it went from one day a week to two days a week to three days a week.
It was always our weekends.
So typically we did four days work and we did like three, the weekend and Friday, working on the product.
Then it became Thursday, Friday and the weekend.
Then it became Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and the weekend.
And eventually we just sold the website business and went fully working on teamwork.
Yeah, it took about two years to get there.
It was kind of when we hit about 100,000 in revenue per month that we were really able to say, this is going places.

Omer (12:40.780)
So you got to.
You guys were doing 100,000 per month in two years.

Peter Coppinger (12:47.500)
I'm not 100% sure about that, but yeah, within three years, certainly.
Yeah.

Omer (12:52.780)
Now you didn't do much marketing, though, right?

Peter Coppinger (12:57.260)
We got slightly better.
The biggest thing with us was we.
We started a referral scheme somewhere along there, and that's done very well for us.
We didn't have that for the first two years.
So automatically any of our customers if they refer people to us, they earn 25% of every referral, which has been great.
Then we simply started getting out of a regular newsletter 12 times a year, which was great to give us that kind of push to get something done, something big done every month.
But also in that newsletter, we encouraged our customers to forward that onto their friends and to spread it around and to retweet about it and so on.
So we started some efforts.
We have to admit that we're still very technically focused and could massively improve there.

Omer (13:44.110)
What do you think was one of the biggest challenges that you guys faced as you were trying to grow this business?

Peter Coppinger (13:51.230)
Biggest challenges, finding staff.
Of course, everyone has that problem.
We're still struggling with that today.
There's so many bad developers floating around, and it's kind of hard to tell how bad they are until they're kind of doing a trial for you.
I'm trying to find them here in Ireland.
There's a lot of good developers in Ireland, but where we are in the south of the country, most of them are up in Dublin.
I suppose at the start, you're struggling as well to pay the wages that the bigger companies are paying.
So until you kind of are earning money, it's hard to get the real good talent.
Apart from that, again, I'd have to go back to the marketing.
We really struggled with that again, we were hiring programmers, but we didn't hire a marketing person until, I think, a year and a half ago.

Omer (14:39.330)
Wow.
And so why was that?

Peter Coppinger (14:43.570)
I think it was probably just a mistake of ours.
I think we were just too focused on product and not focused on the marketing side of things.
Our domain name used to be teamworkpm.net so when we started the product, we knew we wanted to call it Teamwork.
There was just no other name that was right for us.
We had this crap domain, teamworkpm.net and it was about, I think it's two years ago now, we decided to buy teamwork.com and rebrand everything as that cost us a cool half a million euro $765,000 to get.

Omer (15:19.270)
Yeah, I read about that.
That you guys had spent some serious money on that teamwork.com domain.
Why was that particular domain so important to you?

Peter Coppinger (15:35.030)
We know we've a great product.
We know technically the product is very, very strong.
And people tell us all the time on Twitter and on testimonials and feedback and blog posts, they write about us that they've tried every other product out there.
And they come because we're technically the strongest and they love all our features.
But we knew that our marketing was letting us down.
We knew that we really needed to get a much stronger emphasis on the marketing side of things.
Teamwork.com is something we had originally tried to acquire when we started this seven years ago.
We reached out to the guy and asked him how much he'd be willing to sell it for.
And at the time he told us $20 million.
Wouldn't consider any less.
So we reached out again and again over the years.
We knew if we could get this domain, it would be a great coup for us.
Even if two guys are sitting in the pub at night and two business guys and they're talking about what product you use to help you manage your business, nobody's going to remember our old domain, teamworkpm.net but it's a very easy thing to remember.
Teamwork.com we knew it would really help us brands get our branding right.

Omer (16:39.680)
So looking back at the last few years, what do you think was one of the hardest things about building this, this, this product and business?
Now you, you, you talked about the marketing and, you know, the focus on the product and, and I think that one of the things that I researched was like, you know, your, your job title or the way that you, you kind of describe yourself on, on your site is, you know, see co founder, CEO and I believe, lead developer as well.

Peter Coppinger (17:10.620)
Absolutely.

Omer (17:11.500)
So you're, I think you're the first CEO plus lead developer that I've met.
And I think a lot of people would say, you know, I've built products, I've built products that I thought were great that solved a problem that I had, but nobody else wanted to use it.
So what was it that you guys were doing differently?
Why did it work for you?

Peter Coppinger (17:36.720)
Why did it work for us?
I think the big thing with us is we, like those first three years and still today we use our own product every day.
We eat our own dog food.
So because of that, we really get rid of all the rough edges in the product.
We round it out.
Any little thing that annoys us, we know it's going to be annoying our customers as well.
So if a form is slow to pop up or we find adding a task is slow, or we're missing RSS feeds, or we don't have integration with Product X, we'll go and get that done to scratch our own itch.
That's been one of the real reasons teamwork is as good as it is and that people love the feature set.

Omer (18:14.050)
Can you tell me about one particular Example where you lost customers because you guys weren't focusing on the marketing.

Peter Coppinger (18:29.010)
On the marketing.
Mostly it's just the amount of people that came to our website.
We'd often just hear people say that, where have you guys been and why did it take me so long to find you?
That they've done a lot of research and that we are nowhere to be listed.
Simple little things like the Wikipedia project page, a list of project management software were still not listed on that because we didn't have a focus on that.
And now Wikipedia are so stringent that we're finding it very hard to get listed there.
So that's really probably killing us.
There's other things that we were so focused on making the product that we were hosting with the wrong company for a while.
We ran into massive problems there.
I won't name the company, but we were hosting with a company in North America, hosting company.
And one day they just went dark on us and we tried contacting us.
Teamwork was offline.
This is in our early days for I think 24 hours.
And we called and we called and we called.
Here we are in Ireland.
We were getting thousands of calls to hear it was a complete disaster.
I didn't sleep for 24 hours.
There was nothing we could do.
We just keep contacting this hosting company, asking them what's going on.
But they had a massive power outage and their backup generators hadn't kicked in.
So we had a couple of servers with them that were costing us 30,000 each.
But we just ditched the whole lot and we moved everything.
We did a massive research project on what we should do.
We moved everything to Amazon.
If we had been.
I know that's kind of technical as well, but it's kind of more high end looking at the product from a higher point rather than just concentrating on the code every day.
So, yeah, there's lots of little mistakes we made like that.
So we've been with Amazon Web Services ever since that outage back in the early days and we haven't had an outage since.
Nice.

Omer (20:21.820)
I'm sure Mr. Bezos will be very pleased with that.
Now let's talk about the current business.
How many people do you have working at Teamwork today?

Peter Coppinger (20:30.990)
We just hired four.
So I think we're up to 26 now.
26 people.

Omer (20:35.230)
And did you say you guys have done.
You're doing $14 million in revenue?

Peter Coppinger (20:42.270)
We're.
We're heading there.
We're.
I think we're doing $8 million right now.
And we're at the Rate we're growing, we should easily hit the 14 million by the end of the year.
So we're also.
I can't tell you what it is, but I can tell you that we have another two products coming on stream.
So our plan is to be have the world's only suite of business products that actually properly integrate together.
So we're going to.
We're going to help you run your business from soup to nuts.
I know some of the guys here hate that expression, so they're killing me, but that's the plan.
We have a stream of products coming out.

Omer (21:22.080)
So when I did research for this interview, I found a number that you guys were doing about $7 million in 2013.
So it looks like you guys are going to pretty much double that number this year easily.
So what's driving that growth

Peter Coppinger (21:46.170)
at the moment?
Well, teamwork.com alone, that domain name switch, switching our entire branding to that has done massive things for us.
You can see if you look at our sales chart, you can see the inflection point from probably exactly a month after we bought that domain, things really started to grow for us.
That alone has been massive.
The domain paid for itself within a year.
Absolutely.

Omer (22:08.890)
Wow.

Peter Coppinger (22:09.530)
Apart from that, we've just got really stronger on our marketing.
We've got really Stronger.
Our Google AdWords are telling our story, doing interviews like this, getting the word out there.
We're encouraging people to tweet about us more.
We're telling stories on our blog.
Just.
Just putting a lot more effort into the marketing, really.

Omer (22:30.669)
But, you know, I think, you know, you guys have a great story that, first of all, you bootstrapped this business.
Secondly, you know, you guys are doing eight figures in revenue and I believe you're also profitable, right?

Peter Coppinger (22:48.190)
Absolutely.
We've been profitable since the day we turned off our consultancy and turned this business on.
I suppose some people would say that as a negative, we could have grown faster if we'd taken on a bit of investment.
But we've also been really reluctant to give away equity in the company.

Omer (23:10.090)
And so, looking forward at the next few years, what does the future of teamwork look like?
I mean, from what I.
And I should preface that by, you know, from the research I did, you guys have some pretty big plans, right?
I mean, I think you're kind of thinking about yourselves as becoming the market leader.
From what I.
What I.
That was my takeaway.

Peter Coppinger (23:35.200)
Absolutely.
Why not dream big?
As I said earlier on, we definitely want to be the market leader in project management, but we also want to be the market leader in a few other sectors as well.
Instead, we want to help you run your entire business.
So we have a very, very ambitious plan to kind of reach towards 2020 to be hitting 100 million in revenue.
So we're going to do that by bringing a couple of other products on stream that are going to really, really tightly integrate with teamwork.
So nobody else has kind of done this to the degree that we plan to do.
So at the moment we have a teamwork chat beta is currently rolled out to our existing customers that's coming online in two months time to everyone.
And that's going to be a kind of last leading product for us.
People are going to be able to sign up for that completely free and hopefully once they like it, they're going to love the kind of integrations we got going on with that into Tumor pm.
We also have, I can tell you this is why I've been so busy lately when you were trying to get in touch with me.
I think it's in 43 days time, we're launching a massive new product that we've been working on for over seven months.
So hopefully it's going to tackle another industry and it's going to hopefully take the world by storm.

Omer (24:50.710)
Wow.
All right, Peter, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.

Peter Coppinger (24:59.410)
Okay.

Omer (25:00.930)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?

Peter Coppinger (25:05.650)
I definitely have to go back to what I said earlier on Dream Big.
I don't think people do that enough.
I think people.
I definitely meet a lot of entrepreneurs in Ireland who are thinking about the Irish market and I keep telling them, forget about it, it's too small.
Think big, think big.
Whatever you're thinking at the moment, think bigger.

Omer (25:20.770)
What drives that kind of thinking for you?
Where does that come from?

Peter Coppinger (25:25.020)
I think it's from when I was young and I first read about Bill Gates and he was just this ordinary guy that did incredibly incredible things.
I think I was just really inspired from a young age and knew I wanted to make my stamp on the world as well.

Omer (25:37.660)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Peter Coppinger (25:41.340)
Okay, I'd have to recommend 3.
Latest one I've read is an excellent book called Startup CEO A field guide to scaling up your business.
Really, really, really good.
Some very practical tips in there.
That's by Matt Blumberg.
But I'd also have to say, being a complete nerd, that Joel Spolsky is the best Software writing and Joel on software.
Just all his technical essays.
There's so much wisdom in there.
How to write technical specs, how to hire staff.
I just think if you're running a tech company, it's a must read.
And thirdly, what I thought was a great book is Mark Spinioff's Salesforce.
I think it's called.
Behind the Cloud was another very, very good read.

Omer (26:25.850)
Awesome.
Yeah, I had Michael Pryor on the show a few weeks ago who's Joel Spolsky's co founder.
And I love what those guys are doing over at Fog Creek and the kind of the culture that they're building over there.
I think it's a great model that I think a lot of other companies could be learning from.

Peter Coppinger (26:46.140)
Absolutely.
I actually visited their office on an open day a couple of years ago when I was over in New York and you know, I talked to all the guys there.
I'm sure they would remember me from back then.
I was just one of many, but I remember leaving that place and just being so impressed.
I'm sitting here in a Harmon Miller chair, Aaron chair, and you know, after trying them out in their offices at the time I was there, I have to give me one of those.
But we have the policies here.
Like every developer gets their own office with a door you can actually close.
If a developer's door is closed, you leave them alone.
They're working on something.
So yeah, we've taken a lot of inspiration from those guys.

Omer (27:18.160)
Awesome.
What is in your mind, one attribute or characteristic of a successful entrepreneur?

Peter Coppinger (27:28.240)
I would have to say being tenacious, not letting the minor knockbacks distract you from the bigger plan and just keeping at it.
You know, you have to.
You're going to have highs and lows.
You just have to keep at it till you get there.

Omer (27:44.080)
Yeah.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Peter Coppinger (27:49.920)
I've read a lot about this.
I'm tempted to say teamwork, but apart from that, one thing or two things I'd really recommend to people would be single focusing on one task at a time.
So you should know what you're working on.
And don't allow yourself to be distracted by anything else.
If something else pops in your head, jot it down down a task for it for later.
But concentrating, getting your single most important task done at time.
And don't be afraid to delegate the less important tasks.
The second thing then is don't let email become a distraction.
I personally do my emails three times a day.
I'm not one of these people that keeps Them open all day, as I've seen so many other people do.
We're getting like probably getting 500 emails a day.
So I clear them three times a day and that's it.

Omer (28:34.760)
How do you spend your day?
Are you still spending a lot of time actually in the code?

Peter Coppinger (28:39.000)
I'm transitioning away from that.
So there's a bit of a plan there that I've been heads down kind of leading.
This product, this new product coming out for the last seven months, but I've kind of also laid down our architecture for the next five years, was part of that.
But now we're trusting the kind of people that work for me to do a great job.
And I'm kind of going to be doing more of an oversight role.
And one of my biggest goals this year as a CEO is to hire another 20 people.
So I really need to concentrate on that side of things.
So at the moment I'm still spending about half my week coding, but I think in time it's going to be much less than that.

Omer (29:21.310)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what problem or market or opportunity do you find most interesting that you would want to go and tackle?

Peter Coppinger (29:34.030)
There's lots.
There's loads of great ideas pop in my head all the time.
I try not to get distracted by them.
There's a lot of middleware services out there at the moment that aren't being done very well.
For example, we're using, I won't name any of the companies now, but we're using these external companies to help us with processing of millions of incoming emails.
And some of those services have been pretty terrible.
And I keep thinking there's a huge opportunity here for somebody to do it right.
So I've tried personally about six of these guys now and some of them have great reputations and they talk to talk, but they don't walk to walk.
Because big marketer.
The second one then would be, I think Amazon Web Services are doing a good job.
They're definitely the best of what I've seen out there, but I would love to get into that space and create a system for churning out cloud infrastructure that does it even better.

Omer (30:33.900)
Now, it's interesting that you say that there's these players who maybe are not doing something very well and there's an opportunity to do it much better.
And that's kind of basically the same philosophy that you followed when you started out building the teamwork product.
But I think there are a lot of people out there who can see these opportunities.
They can see your products and they Say there's a gap there.
They could be doing it better.
It doesn't necessarily mean they can go and build a better product, because it's not like these guys are sitting there saying, let's build a crappy product.
There's a whole bunch of challenges that come with doing these things.
So why do you feel that you could do it better?

Peter Coppinger (31:18.240)
Simply because I wouldn't just.
Again, the tenaciousness.
I wouldn't stop until it is better.
I would work night and day on it.
I'd plan it, I'd talk about it, I'd dream about it, eat and sleep it.
Just until we get to where I want it to be.
And I kind of try to instill that passion in everyone here.
We want to make the best software in the world.
We don't want to make mediocre software.
We're not going to accept.
Okay.
We want to be the best, have the best offer in the industry.
Awesome.

Omer (31:44.950)
All right.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Peter Coppinger (31:51.910)
Wow, let me think.
So there's one interesting fact is back in our consultancy days when we were very young and naive, we were probably still only 21, 22 years old, fresh out of college.
There was a day, wet, miserable day in Cork.
We had these replica handguns which are completely illegal in Ireland.
They just shot little pellets.
You know, one wet, miserable day, there was nobody around and I shot this street sign out the window.
And about 20 minutes later, we had the armed guardi.
The police of Ireland raided our office.

Omer (32:27.720)
Oh, my God.

Peter Coppinger (32:29.800)
It was much pointer hour, but yeah.

Omer (32:33.720)
Wow, that's a.
That should be an interesting.
You should put that on your website.
Interesting milestone in the development of the company.

Peter Coppinger (32:43.080)
Trouble with the guys for.

Omer (32:45.800)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Peter Coppinger (32:52.120)
Definitely traveling.
I love traveling the world.
I just spent six months in America.
I did a month before that traveling around Central America.
Had an absolutely amazing time.
Diving dives, great blue hole.
Just seeing the world getting out there and seeing it all.

Omer (33:11.460)
All right, great answers, Peter.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about teamwork, they can now go to teamwork.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Peter Coppinger (33:31.810)
You can just shoot me an email.
Petereamwork.com awesome, Peter.

Omer (33:35.730)
Thanks again.
I wish you continued success.

Peter Coppinger (33:37.410)
Thank you very much, Omer.
Thank you.

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