that to a large firm in Omaha called West Interactive. So I had no capital costs.
We turned profitable in the summer of 1994.
Livingston: That’s less than 2 years.
Gruner: Yes. We had a seed financing in July of ’92.
Livingston: Who were your investors?
Gruner: It was just a small group of about 8 to 10 of my friends and business
associates, who put in about $25,000 each. We raised $276,000. I nursed that
money very carefully, worked without a salary for quite a while. It turned profitable
in the summer of ’94, and I just grew the company organically until I sold
it to NASDAQ in January of 2006.
Of course, we had some really good breaks. The Web was a huge one. When
that developed, starting in ’95, we jumped right on that. People were saying,
“What are you going to do? You’re all telephone-based technology, and here’s
this thing called the Internet.” So we thought, “It’s just another technology.”
Having learned from Alliant about not moving quickly enough, we were on it
right away.
Campbell’s Soup, for example, was one of our earliest clients, and the first
time they had a corporate website was through us. If you look back at their
annual report in, I think, ’95, they said, “If you would like shareholder information,
please call 1-800-XXX-SOUP”—that was their Shareholder Direct line—
“or visit our website at www.shareholder.com/campbell.”
So we started the web service and took it a day at a time, built the business
up. We focused very strongly on client satisfaction. We’d do everything it took
to keep a client happy. And we focused on the bigger clients.
Livingston: The Internet was just making a splash in corporate America. Was it
hard to convince big companies to embrace the Internet?
Gruner: It really wasn’t too hard. The initial costs were very low. We would go
in and say, “Look, we are investor relations specialists. We know this area very
well and we know you have a web development team. But this is a very specialized
area. If you want to do this well, you need real-time SEC feeds and stock
quotes. When you put up a news release, it needs to be done”—even back
then—“in a few hours. You can’t wait a few days to put a news release up.” So
that wasn’t too hard to sell.
Livingston: They could outsource all these things to Shareholder.com?
Gruner: That’s right. In the ’80s and early ’90s, the investor relations officer
was really an underappreciated asset. They were understaffed and underbudgeted.
So we would go in and say, “Our job is to make your life easier. You send