For a grand total of $7,500 ($4,000 of which was on a credit card)... founder Travis Ketchum set out to solve his biggest challenge in growing an online business from scratch - something every small business needs to survive.

How to build an big email list, quickly.

His solution was to run a contest, but all available solutions at the time gave points to contestants for the act of sharing instead of giving an incentive for the actual opt-in.

After several developers and many of the same mistakes every non-technical founder goes through when trying to create a software company he finally had something that worked.

Contests instantly helped Travis add thousands of people to his email list, and the product launched to thousands of new customers within just a few months of entering the market.

And suddenly, Contest Domination changed the way people think about viral lead generating campaigns.

Just 7 months after launching the original WordPress plugin, it was clear that Contest Domination was resonating with customers who ran all kinds of businesses.

Having already grossed well into 6 figures as a simple plugin, customer demands were quickly outpacing the capabilities of what a simple WordPress plugin could do.

Travis partnered up with a veteran developer and started hiring designers to create a fully hosted "SaaS" app that didn't run on WordPress at all. All new from the ground up.

The much more ambitious app entered public beta in November 2012 and fully launched in April 2013. Again adding thousands of new customers in just a few short weeks, and validating that there's something to this whole "contest thing".

Now, we've been able to help 10's of thousands of businesses generate many millions of contest entries.. Everyone from solo entrepreneurs to huge global brands depends on us for a significant part of their email growth.