Matt Barrie

No sales team. So what about marketing?

I’ve got three guys but they’re not really doing marketing. A little bit. Not a lot. We don’t spend any money on adverts or anything like that. It’s basically just around making the site so that the users recommend the site to other people, and fantastic search engine optimisation. I do a lot of public speaking and a lot of communications which generates sales but we have no sales force, and I’m glad we have no sales force.

And what would be the most valuable marketing you’ve done in the past year?

Without a doubt it’s SEO. We’ve tried a whole bunch of different things, and nothing beats someone typing something into Google and you being the number one listing. In terms of traffic, you can’t get to the 249^th biggest website in the world without being really, really, effective at SEO, there’s no way you can do it. I mean, the size of the marketing budget we’d need would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to do that without SEO. And that’s tricky, because there’s a whole bunch of arcane knowledge that you require, it’s all engineering driven, it’s all algorithmic, it’s all computer sites and so on, to do that.

How many people do you have working on your SEO?

I’ve got the engineering team involved, so depending on what we’re doing it’ll fluctuate. But we’ve got a handful of people on it pretty much dedicated fulltime to it. So, three or so.

How do you think your background has helped you in this role?

I certainly wouldn’t be in the position I am today without a bunch of things. One is, you can be a good chief executive in the technology industry without an engineering background or engineering degree, but you’ll never be great. You need to have a deep, deep, deep knowledge of technology in order to be able to hire the right people. We’ve got an absolutely top notch bunch of engineers who are PhDs, you name it, and you simply can’t attract those people to your company if your CEO is not technical themselves, because they won’t respect you. The technical guys get who the technical people are.

The other thing is that without the experience I went through in previous companies, some of which didn’t go so well, like my last one in particular [Sensory Networks], is key. It’s still running, it’s still surviving 12 years down the track and it’s actually slightly profitable, but I wouldn’t call it a success, I’d call it a bit of a disaster, but at the moment it’s plodding along.

I wouldn’t be in this position without six years running that company and learning from failure and learning from trying to sell very sophisticated technology into a market that was too early. There were also a whole lot of problems around the business model in terms of how we solved the problems and the technology and the sales model and so forth. Dealing with investors and going through the tech crash and all that sort of stuff like that, without that sort of learning experience I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in today.

And what are your plans for growth?

We want to be huge. So we want to be the eBay of jobs, which means we want to get in the top 20 websites worldwide. We’re at 249, so we’ve got a little way to go. We’re at four million users, 2.3 million projects, but we need to add some zeroes, so we need 400 million users, and 230 million projects. So really for us it’s putting our head down and making sure the site is easy to use and grows more virally. We’re looking hard at the analytics and a lot of it’s really product driven at this point, it’s getting our product better.

How are you going to be more profitable in the future?

The whole thing’s natural. Everything scales. Like revenue’s proportional to projects, and the number of projects being posted is proportional to the number of users that sign up, and the number of users signing up is proportional to the web traffic that we get. So the whole thing is linked, right, so basically you’ve got this product pipeline and product funnel, and it’s basically optimising what’s in that pipeline.

Have you made any management mistakes? What’s your biggest mistake?

All the time. The worst one would be hiring the wrong people for the role. Hiring is one of the most difficult things you’ll do, and something that you’ll never solve and then, in certain respects, it kind of gets harder and harder and harder as time goes on in the lifetime of a company: because, early on, you have to attract certain people to your company that are willing to take risks.

You get a certain kind of person, you get these guys who are really entrepreneurial and really aggressive and have a lot of initiative and that’s great, but as the company goes on and you get bigger and bigger, you get a bunch of people who don’t want to work at a company that’s bigger than 40 people, or 100 people or 1000 people or so on. The type of person you can attract changes over time.

So hiring’s always the biggest challenge. I’d say some of my biggest mistakes in my entire history have been putting the wrong person in a certain role; you kind of need to hire slowly and fire quickly, before things get entrenched and behaviours change. The fish rots from the head, right? So it’s all top-down, in a company or a culture. You get the wrong person in the wrong position or role, and that can just be toxic for the rest of the company.

You don’t always get these decisions right, because when you go through the interview process you don’t get a lot of time to be able to really figure out a person and see what they’re about. Someone might be great technically but a bad cultural fit or they might be a great cultural fit but bad technically. There’s all these different ways in which things can go wrong. You just need to be continually on the ball.

In making decisions quickly, you end up with rot, you end up with a company that’s bloated and the culture decays as a result of that. Early on with Google, for example, where you’ve got Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they can start off and hire all their friends, all the people like them. They’ve got this great bunch of really tech savvy guys, right. Okay, so if you hire all your friends, you get from 10 people to 100 people, and then you get from 100 to 200. But the problem is – and all the time you’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be like Microsoft, it’s big, it’s bloated, the people there are bad’ – but the problem is when you get to 200 or 300 people, you start looking around going, ‘Well, jeez, where are we going to hire next? We have all the top graduates from all the top universities in the area, what are we going to do?’

What happens is you just start hiring people from Microsoft, for example. And the next thing you know is when you get to 5,000, 10,000 people, how big you are. You’ve hired all the people who were working at all these companies you never liked in the first place, because the culture was bad, simply because you can’t find more people like you, because they simply don’t exist in the area you’re in. So these are all these challenges in hiring. And it’s not just in employees, it’s in your management team, your board of directors, all the people around you; you’ve got to be really discerning and spend time to get it right, and if you make a mistake you have to rip the Band Aid off.

So what’s your target, turnover wise, for the next year?

We work by calendar year, and we’ve been running compound about 85% or so for the last three years’ growth and we just want to try and beat that every year. I haven’t got the number off the top of my head at the moment. Because we’ve had acquisitions the number’s changed a bit, but all I can say is in the last 12 months we’ve done $52 million in US dollars in turnover. If we can double that every year it’s fantastic, you can’t do it forever, but we want to keep pushing.