Peter Coppinger, Teamwork
From Side Project to $14M SaaS ARR, Bootstrapped to Profit
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.
