This week I was fortunate to catch up with Matt Mickiewicz and he took some time to answer some interview questions.

Matt is the 25 year old Co-Founder of Sitepoint.com, one of the most popular webmaster websites in the world.

Adam: You have had an extraordinary career so far, you started out at 15, what inspired you at that age?

Matt: The entire business idea came about because I developed an interest in building websites, and had a tough time finding resources, tools, and online services that would help me get the job done. As a result, I had to invest countless hours to just find the information, software and know-how that I needed.
It came to me that if I was having this problem, countless other people were as well, so I started documenting and categorizing all the useful links that I was finding during my research and put them online as a one-page site. The rest, is history.

Adam: Do you still have the same passion for the internet as you did back then?

Matt: Yes! There’s something new & great almost every day, and I love keeping up with the latest trends, business models and marketing techniques.

Adam: What motivates you to keep going 10 years on, do you always have new projects on the go?

Matt: I’m busier than ever before. 99designs, our marketplace for crowd sourced graphic design is about to celebrate it’s 18 month anniversary and is already the market leader with enormous upside potential that we’re busy executing on.
Furthermore, we just spun-out SitePoint’s Marketplace as a new company – Flippa.com – and I’m very much looking forward to the challenges & growth opportunities that new business brings.

Adam: How did you juggle your school life with such an intense business?

Matt: Long hours, and little sleep. My cell phone was certainly incredibly useful, in allowing me to spend my lunch hours returning phone calls and making advertising sales.

Adam: You are an inspiration for many young entrepreneurs who would like to follow in your footsteps, what lessons have you learned that you can share with them?

Matt: Creating anything of value takes a long, long time. There are absolutely no shortcuts, and if you dig deeply into all the so called “instant success” stories, you’ll find that they’ve often been decades in the making.
Extreme patience will be required to be successful, and everything will take longer than you hoped for. I’d also highly recommend being flexible, and realize that where you end up will probably not look anything like what you had imagined at the beginning. For example, I never thought SitePoint would end up publishing Web Design & Web Development books when we started, nor that we would start two spin-off companies and end up running three businesses.

Adam: How has your management style changed over the years?

Matt: I don’t manage. We have great General Managers at both SitePoint and 99designs who take care of running the teams, which are primarily Melbourne-based.

Adam: Do you think that your age has worked for or against you in your sector?

Matt: Other than not being able to order a beer at some of the conferences and events that I attended because I wasn’t 21, I can’t say I’ve experienced any discrimination.
Even to this day, when we hire new staff members, they often think I’m several years older than I really am.

Adam: SitePoint made most of its revenue first from advertising and then from publishing, how did this business model evolve?

Matt: When the dot-com crash happened in 2000/2001, we still had to pay rent and salaries. So we had a look at what our users were doing, and it turns out, they were printing out our content.
At the time, dual-monitors setups were rare, so it made sense that someone looking to learn programming would like to have the material next to their keyboard so they could easily follow along, rather than having to click back & forth between multiple applications on their desktop.
When we noticed this behavior, we asked ourselves – “What’s the cheapest, most risk-free way that we can test whether our users will pay for having us print out the content for them?”
So what we decided to do was take our most popular tutorial, and turn it into a print-on-demand book that we sold for $34.95.
We didn’t have to invest in large print runs, warehousing, or even the creation of the content – since we already had it. To our great joy, the book sold tremendously well and is now in its 4th edition with over 40,000 copies sold: “Build Your Own Database-Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL, 4th Edition” by Kevin Yank.

Adam: You have already been through one economic downturn when the dot-com bubble burst, what advice have you got for entrepreneurs just starting out in this current economic climate?

Matt: Create multiple revenue streams wherever possible, and start charging money for your offers as early as possible. To give you another example, SitePoint’s Marketplace for buying & selling websites began in our Forums, and before investing even a single dollar in development of an auction platform we simply attached a $9.95 listing fee in order to create a new “Website for Sale” thread. People happily paid it, listing volume grew, and only then did we build out more robust software.
That’s VERY different from most entrepreneurs, who spend months or years and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing products, services or applications on the theory that customers will pay money for them. Learn to fail cheaply, and test your assumptions as early as possible.

Adam: Mark Harbottle, your business partner and the Co-Founder of SitePoint and 99 designs, lives and works in Australia have there been any additional challenges for you as a result of this or has this given the company a market advantage?

Matt: Being based in Melbourne has been enormously advantageous from a cost perspective. Over the years, we’ve been able to take advantage of the USD/AUD exchange rate, and hire staff members that have would have otherwise been unaffordable in Silicon Valley.

Adam Toren