Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Eddie Machaalani, the CEO of Interspire.
Q: Give us the elevator pitch for Interspire?
Interspire provides affordable e-commerce, content management, and email marketing software that helps businesses of all sizes better compete and succeed online. Interspire is customer inspired, meaning our software development process is based on customer feedback. We also provide first-class customer service and tech support — as well as a 60-day, no-questions-asked refund policy to every new customer. Our dedication to providing quality products that people actually enjoy using is what’s made Interspire as popular as it is today, with more than 30,000 people in over 60 countries using an Interspire product every day.
Q: How did you choose Austin for your US headquarters?
The U.S. is a huge market for us, with probably 40 percent of our revenues coming from the United States. And we really wanted to cater to our customers and partners here, by building a local sales, marketing and tech support team dedicated to helping them. We asked some of the contractors we worked with here where they recommended, and this one software marketing consultant, who had traveled and worked all over the States, highly recommended Austin. Not only did it seem like a really nice city but there was a lot of great tech talent, and it was affordable, especially for a “startup”, compared to other cities we checked out. And it’s in the Central time zone, which is good as we do a lot of business over the phone.
Q: How long has the company been around, and what success have you had in other countries so far?
Interspire incorporated in 2003, but we’ve actually been around, developing and selling web-based software, since 1999. We — my partner Mitchell Harper and I — started out in Sydney, Australia, and were immediately successful, but interestingly most of those early sales came from the States. We’ve also had a lot of success in Europe and recently set up an office in London. Today, we have customers and partners in just about every country in the world.
Q: How have you funded the company?
The company has been bootstrapped from day one. We had no VC money, no angel investor. I was doing contract work by day, and building the company at night. A friend of mine let me borrow some space and his Internet access, but other than that Mitch and I funded the company entirely ourselves. Fortunately, we got the website and software up pretty quickly, and the software started selling straight away. So we were able to make money pretty quickly.
Q: What can we expect to see in the future from Interspire?
Right now we’re hiring very aggressively, building a very smart, talented sales, marketing, and tech support team. And we’re about to move into our new offices, where Google and Microsoft and Oracle have space, which we’re really excited about. As for the future, we’re really focused on servicing and growing the U.S. market, adding new customers and partners. We’re also working on our new SaaS e-commerce platform (www.bigcommerce.com), which should be available in a few months to go hand in hand with our SaaS email marketing platform (www.bigresponse.com), and on expanding our presence in Europe.
Q: There are many high tech companies in Austin, many if not most of which were there before you. Why should someone come work for Interspire?
One, because of our software. It’s really good software. And I’m not just saying that. We get a lot of feedback from our customers saying how happy they are to use the software. And that they’re making money. It makes providing tech support and customer service and sales and marketing, all those things, so much easier. And we really take care of our employees. I’m not just talking benefits, which are quite good, but the whole work environment. In Australia we have a Friday lunch, where we take all the staff out for a pub lunch that the company pays for. It’s good fun, and everyone really enjoys themselves. We’re planning on doing something similar here, once we’ve settled in.
Q: Where did the name “Interspire” come from?
We were looking for a name that described what we did, providing web- or Internet-based software, which was inspired by our customers. We tried out a bunch of different combinations of things, checking to see if the domain had been registered by someone. And we ultimately came up with Interspire, for “Internet inspired.” By the way, we really practice what we preach. Some software companies say they value customer feedback, but our software is actually customer driven. That’s why our tag line is “Web software inspired by you.”
