Derek Johnson - Tatango - www.Tatango.com

1. What is the startup story behind www.tatango.com?

The idea came to me in 2007 while I was having lunch with a friend that was part of a Sorority on campus. She was telling me the troubles her sorority was having with getting a hold of everyone in her chapter to let them know about meeting times, event locations, etc. and nothing seemed to be working for them. I thought group text messaging could be the answer to their problems so I went home to look for a solution for her chapter. The surprising thing, I couldn’t find anything online that was perfect for a group like a Sorority. That’s when I had the idea to build my own website that allowed groups such as a sorority the ability to blast out a text message to all their members at the same time.

The website was originally launched as networkText at the end of 2007, and members have sent over 15 million text messages to a wide variety of groups, including college clubs, religious organizations, non-profit associations, athletic teams and businesses since the launch.

On july 15th, we are re-launching the website into private invitation only Beta, under the name Tatango. With the new website, Tatango, users are going to have a much superior user interface, more available features and an increased usability factor. I am going to give 200 invitations to Young Entrepreneur readers, for the Tatango Beta. They can get them here: http://www.tatango.com/invites/ye

2. What is your definition of success and has your company achieved it?

If we aren’t looking solely at financials, any company that is successful in my mind is one that has a service or product that can supply a need in the market that isn’t being filled. I believe Tatango is very successful for the sole reason that we filled a void in the market that no other website was able to filled.

3. To what do you attribute your company’s recent achievements?

There are two groups of people that are responsible for the company’s achievements. The first group is the people that work here at Tatango, Our team members kick ass everyday and deserve way more credit then they get. The second group responsible for the company’s achievements is our users. We have extremely loyal, and vocal users and they have become our biggest marketing tool as they tell others about their positive experience with Tatango.

4. How important have good employees and team members been to your success?

Hands down, we owe the majority of our success to our team members. We have created the dream team at our company and daily I’m amazed at their hustle and commitment to the company. In the marketing department, we have Andrew Dumont and Luciano Mauro, who together have taken our company in only a handful of months from a few thousand users to over 400,000. On the website side, we have two of the hottest young engineers, Adrian Pike and Amiel Martin, who are constantly working crazy hours to keep up with our growth. These guys are machines really, releasing new features faster than other companies with at least three times as many resources as we have.

On another note, I am a firm believer of not wasting time in getting rid of employees that aren’t working out. I have found it easy to find employees that have the needed skill set to get a job done, the real challenge for us is to find employees that fit within the culture of the company. This is key to anyone that wants to build up a business. By being extremely picky and focused in hiring, we have been able to find the perfect team members.

5. What three pieces of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

1. Be Available - I’m the only internet CEO I know who makes himself as available to his users as I am. The majority of our users know my personal cell phone number (206.334.4012 if they have forgot it) and they know that if they ever have a suggestion or any feedback about our website, they are able to get a hold of me. I think communicating with your users is extremely important and is the sole reason why we keep launching features that users love and our competitors copy.

2. Start Small - Start small and you will be able to quickly see if you have something interesting before you look to expand.

3. Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel - No matter what problem you are experiencing or challenge you have in front of you, you aren’t the first person to ever go through it. Seek out advice or guidance from someone that has gone through the same thing you are going through, this will save you from making a lot of costly mistakes in the future.

6. What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?

Our biggest mistake was to not set up our advisory board sooner in the company’s life. Our company’s advisory board has been a huge help to us and we rely on them for a large amount of the challenges we run into.

7. Describe/outline your typical day?

I start everyday at 7AM by catching up on industry news. I usually read TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and I like to throw in ValleyWag for my tech gossip. I’m usually in the office by 9am and from there it’s different every day, though mostly filled with emails, phone calls, team meetings, brainstorming, investor meetings while constantly updating our twitter status. You can check us out at twitter.com/Tatango. I think that’s why I like my job so much, it’s always different everyday I walk into our office. I’m a notorious workaholic, I won’t leave the office till midnight or 1am, but I have started taking Sundays off, so that’s a start to my rehab.

8. Where did your organizations funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it?

I was 22 when I started to look for the initial funding to get my idea off the ground. I quickly came to the harsh realization that at my age, it was going to be hard. Banks wouldn’t touch us and Venture Capitalists and Angel Organizations said we didn’t have enough experience. This left us pitching family and friends that we knew believed in our idea, but most importantly they believed in us personally to succeed. It took us about a month, doing over 20 presentations in my basement to raise our initial seed money.

Once we knew we had something and we had started to gain traction, we needed additional capital above and beyond the limits that our friends and family could invest, so we submitted applications to 6 or 7 local Angel Organizations. Every single Angel organization that we had applied to rejected us. Wow, that was a huge blow for us, but we took their feedback and comments and re-applied a few months later. We finally got accepted to present to the Bellingham Angels and raised our second round of capital through their organization.

With the growth we keep seeing, we have been recently speaking with several different venture capital firms that have shown interest in our company.

9. What stops you from throwing in the towel and giving up during those frustrating days of running your business?

To be honest, when things get crazy, frustrating, or just near impossible, I never think about throwing in the towel. For me, those are the fun days! When do you get to test your skills and determination more than at those points in your business career? Those are the sort of obstacles that make what I do such a challenge and so rewarding.

10. Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur?

That is really two questions. The first part is the formula for becoming successful, which from my observations is 20% knowledge and education and 80% hard work. A lot of people think it takes a lot of luck to become successful, I completely disagree. Gary Player, a great golfer said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get”, this pretty much sums it up for me.

The second part of the question is the formula to becoming an entrepreneur. This is always heavily debated, but I firmly believe you are born with the entrepreneurial mindset or aren’t, you can’t learn something like that.

11. Who has influenced you most and been your greatest inspiration?

My Father. He is both a brilliant entrepreneur and one of the hardest workers I know. He has both experiences working for large national companies and owning his own startups, so his knowledge and experience has always been a great resource for me.

12. What book has inspired you the most?

I wish I could say I read all the time and that a certain book has really inspired me, but school really took the fun out of opening up a book for enjoyment. Even though I’m not a big fan of reading books, I love reading and staying current with news, especially industry related news. It’s a must to be constantly reading industry news, especially if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

13. How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?

Initially we used two tools to drive traffic to the site. The first tool was using social networks such as Facebook and Myspace to get the word out there about the website. Social networks are great tools if you don’t really have a marketing budget and you want to connect to easily spread your message nationwide. The second tool we used was to pick up the phone and start marketing. We called every type of group we could get a phone number for and wouldn’t hang up until we knew they were sold on the concept.

The cool thing right now is that the majority of our new traffic is derived from user referrals. People that actually stake their own reputation and recommend another service based on their experience is the best type of marketing I could ever ask for.

14. In one word, characterize your life as an entrepreneur.

CRAZY

15. Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?

I think I admire certain aspects of individual companies more then one company exclusively. I admire Zappos for the way they treat and motivate their employees. I admire Apple for their amazing product innovation, which is always cutting edge and I admire Google for their size and scale they have been able to achieve in such a short amount of time.

16. How do you achieve balance in your life? Or do you?

I’m the worst person to speak with about achieving a balanced life. I’m a workaholic, plain and simple. I love to work, and when I’m working I’m extremely focused, and usually things that aren’t work related fall by the wayside. I am very focused on building an Internet company, which takes most of my time; I don’t have much time for anything else besides that.

17. Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years? 10 years?

5 Years – Tatango acquired and personally on my third startup

10 Years - on my too many to count startup

18. What’s your exit strategy?

I can see Tatango in the future being acquired by a larger company looking to jump-start their mobile advertising reach.

19. If we could introduce you to anyone, who would it be and why? (you never know who we know!)

Roger D. Linquist, the CEO of MetroPCS. This is the only cell phone provider that we currently don’t support and I would love to get them onboard with Tatango, I know my users would appreciate this too.

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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