Kristopher B. Jones: The Small-Town Big Man

22/2008 Issue: Page 66

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His speech is peppered with "awesome" and "ready to rock and roll," as if he were fresh out of high school. He's only 32 but he feels luck has a lot to do with his good fortune. He took what was basically an idea to sell jam and turned it into a successful online marketing company.

But we're jumping ahead. Jones is a small-town fellow. He grew up around the quiet northeastern Scranton, Pa., region - in towns with quaint names like Forty Fort and Wilkes-Barre. He still lives in basically the same area where he was raised and headquarters his business not far from those same stomping grounds.

He knew early on that he wanted to be in public service - drawn to the tantalizing returns of politics. After graduating high school in 1994, he got a full scholarship to Villanova University to study experimental psychology in 1998 after graduating from Penn State, but questioned whether he really wanted to be a clinical psychologist.

During that period, his brother Rick called and asked, "What do you think about selling grandma's Mississippi mud over the Internet?" Jones says while he was the resident computer guru in school and was sitting on a lot of school and credit card debt, he was pretty committed to going to law school. He decided he would finish out his law degree and start this gourmet food business.

Grandma's Mississippi mud was actually a kind of jelly he had eaten as a kid. He calls it a kind of gourmet dip. He typed the ingredients into the Web and out came the popular Northeast dip called pepper jelly. But Jones didn't want to sell just another pepper jelly. In the end - and after consulting a friend in the food business - they decided on "Grandma Jones' Originals Pepper Jam."

It Started With the Jam

That, Jones says, was when his entrepreneurial spirit came out. He could point to other adventures in his business past - the lawn business he had in school and the 1-900 psychic service he started, even day trading - but they never really made any money.

The pepper jam, on the other hand, had legs. Through contacts in the gourmet food business, it started to get some traction. The business was started in 1999. "My brother was the creative side and he had all these flavors he wanted to do," Jones says. "It all happened pretty quickly. I was going to do all the marketing. I drove the branding and launched the website called pepperjam.com. We personalized it with pictures and stories."

Soon they realized in order to get traffic and sales, they needed to rank higher in the search engines. The most obvious way at the time was to cycle in fresh content. So, they then came up with the idea to interview famous chefs and put those up on the site. In the end, they posted interviews with the likes of Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse and Jorge Bruce, to name just a few.

Bruce sampled the product and loved it. At the time Bruce was looking to hire a consultant to get his brand and other chefs online, Jones said. "I will try to cook with this product," he told Jones. "He may have thought we had offices when we were really operating out of a kitchen," said Jones. Bruce suggested QVC. "I went into shock," says Jones, "and had to put the phone on the bed and take a breath a minute. At the time, he was the highest-grossing chef on QVC."

The chef interviews were getting a lot of traffic now and the question of how to monetize it all became important. That's when Jones joined LinkShare and started adding affiliate links (his first check from ValueClick was for something like $37). He was just about to leave for law school and was trying to make money through affiliate marketing when in early 2000, he says he began his marketing journey in earnest. "I still own 50 percent of the gourmet food business," he said. His brother told him to take the marketing business and he'd handle the product. "I knew that the Net marketing side of this requires work. I just started to build out websites - build out content based on a theme. My first was cookware."

Also in 2000, he adds, Google came out with AdWords. "I was generating close to $100,000 per month in affiliate profits," he said. He was doing this while doing his consulting work and serving as law school class president two years in a row.

"Once I had money, I wanted to do something with it," he says. He put all the cash he had been earning while in school into this single idea - to turn his super-affiliate status into a new kind of marketing business - pepperjam.com. "We got an office. I hired my best friend as COO. We knew we could hire smart, young professionals and could help these businesses that were coming online and had no clue what affiliate marketing was," Jones says.

Getting Into the Affiliate Game

2003 was the breakout year. Jones didn't realize the impact his company was having until he went to his first LinkShare symposium (they got invited through Overstock.com). "We went to this event not knowing anybody and thought no one knew who we were," he says. "My attitude was, 'I'm a super-affiliate, let me manage your affiliate program.' We were blown away." When a merchant rep found out who he was, she hugged him. "You've been making us so much money," she told him and introduced him to a whole bunch of merchants. "We were very well received," he says.

With that boost in his pocket, Jones parlayed that excitement into a new small office and started to hire employees. From 2003 to 2005 he built his client list. From 2005 on, he says, it took on a life of its own. In 2006, the company was about 28 employees. Then pepperjam made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. It was the only affiliate marketing company on the list. "As a search engine marketing agency, we were one of three with iCrossing and MoreVisibility." All he could say was, "It was just a big party. We're pepperjam, we're in the black and we're an Inc. 500 company."

While still nurturing a desire to serve in a public way, he was invited to speak at a conference for the first time in 2004. He's been hooked ever since and speaks quite often all over the country. It kind of feels like he's class president all over again.

Somewhere amid all this work, he did manage to get married - to someone who works for the company. Continued on Page 2...

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