David Bateman has successfully started two businesses, DearElder.com and Property Solutions. He has a degree from Brigham Young University.
Tell us about your background.
I was born in a little town called Loma, Montana. I’ve only met one other person in my life that had ever heard of that city. It has a population of about 300 people, and I was born on a little farm. When I was in first grade I moved to Spokane, Washington, when my dad decided he wanted to be a stock market analyst instead of a farmer, kind of a strange transition. In my senior year of high school I moved back to Billings, Montana, and finished high school there. I went to Montana State University for a semester and didn’t like it as much as I thought I would, so I transferred to Brigham Young University. I did one semester at BYU and then went on a mission for the LDS Church in Honduras, Tegucigalpa. After two years in Honduras, I went back to BYU.
How did you start your first business?
I didn’t really know that I wanted to start a business, but I had always done entrepreneurial type of things and wanted to find ways to make lots of money. During the first year back from my mission, I did curb painting making $40 to $60 per hour painting numbers on curbs. I did it with my partners who I had done business with all through high school.
One year after I got back from my mission, I started DearElder.com. In Honduras I had a heck of a time getting letters in a timely manner. I was in a class where the teacher said, “The best way to start a business is to find a place where there is pain and get rid of it.” With the time delay I experienced in letter delivery on my mission, I thought there might be a way I can solve the problem while making some money. I wasn’t very sophisticated from the business model standpoint, and a lot of my mentors at BYU told me I was crazy for wanting to start it. I went through with it anyway and started a business where we let people submit letters on a Web site. We printed them for free and got them delivered to the missionaries inexpensively. It didn’t really have any way of making money in the beginning, but I felt like I was building an online billboard where I could advertise services or products after I got traffic to the site. I thought this would be a very easy way to generate a lot of traffic to the site. To start the business I didn’t have any experience with programming or technical knowledge. I didn’t have any money either, so I went and got a job at a Web development company in order to figure out how to build a Web site. In that process I took a bunch of programming classes at BYU and learned how to design application software. I spent about 18 months working on the site. Every other night I wouldn’t sleep and stayed up all night and programmed. I tried to automate every little process, from responding to customer emails, etc. Even now I do anything I can to automate the system and make everything as simple as possible.
We started getting a lot of traffic. Within a month we were doing 50 to 60 letters a week, after two months we had 150 to 200 letters each week, three or four months into it we had 150 to 200 letters each week, and three or four months into it we were up to 400 to 500 letters per week. Probably eight months into it we had 1,000 letters. A year into it we had 1,500 letters. After 18 months into it we were doing about 3,000 letters per week.
I originally started making money from the advertising. I was in pretty good debt from my first year in college, and I had bought a car and a bunch of stuff. I ended up paying off all my debt by selling banner ads on the Web site. I then started sending off care packages. I even introduced some faster services where we got the letters printed off down in the countries where the missionaries were serving. We charge | 
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