Jason Louro – at 21, he is the CEO of a company that has $1 Million in revenue.
In 2015, Portuguese-descendant Jason Louro, from Hartford, Connecticut, was a high school student like so many others working at the ‘Tunxis Grill & Pizzeria’ on a part-time basis to earn money. Today, and only at 21 years old, he is at the head of a software company that since November 2018 has become profitable, having reached the mark of 1 million dollars in revenue. “What I always wanted was to be a film director, IT (Information Technology) was my plan B”, says Jason Louro, in an exclusive interview with the LA newspaper.
Life – and destiny – changed the order of his priorities and today Louro, who finished his degree in computer science and philosophy in December at Northeastern University in Boston (“it was the ‘double major’ I chose”), is the CEO of a company that produces software for anyone who wants to succeed as a book author.
Jason was born in Hartford; his father, Carlos Louro, is a native of Angola and son of a Portuguese couple from Cortiçal, Santarém. His mother, Sally Tereso Louro, is a first generation Portuguese-American born in Massachusetts but with origins in Alcobaça. The young CEO grew up in Windsor and attended high school at Suffield Academy. He then shortly transitioned to the well-known Northeastern University.
“As soon as I finished at my university with a minor in cinema, my idea was to move to Los Angeles,” he says. “However, two years ago, I wanted to write my first cinematographic script and since I couldn’t find any software program that I liked, I decided to create one that was more visually appealing”.
It was August 2018 when Jason Louro got to work. Then, two months later ‘Campfire’ was born, with the tools he believed essential for anyone who wanted to give wings to their literary imagination. He was 19 when he started selling the software product.
“In the first month, we sold 10 or 15 subscriptions, if that,” says Louro. “In the following month, November, we invested in a campaign with Youtubers and in advertising on Facebook and Instagram and it worked, despite it being a great financial risk at the time. After all, we spent $3,000 and we still hadn’t sold many copies of ‘Campfire’. Sales, however, skyrocketed and, at the end of the month, we had already accumulated $30,000 in revenue. We reinvested part of the profit in new promotional campaigns. “This is where our growth began,” he adds.
It would not be long before the company recorded their first million dollars in revenue. “Not bad for someone who invested only about 3 thousand dollars at the beginning”, he stresses. “Since then, all of our months have been profitable. I have to say that reaching the million in revenue was a bit surreal, it’s an incredible figure! ”
The company has 7 full-time employees and 17,000 users of its initial product, ‘Campfire Pro’. In November of this year, Louro launched ‘Campfire Blaze’, a ‘freemium’ app (open access but with restricted use) that has 20,000 users.
With all his employees working remotely (“since we started, not just since the pandemic”), Jason Louro wants to move to Lisbon “between June or July” of 2021 and take ‘Campfire’ with him for a year. “I just need my laptop to be able to manage the company from any side of the globe and, in Lisbon, I will have the opportunity to improve my Portuguese”, notes Louro, who has dual nationality and expresses himself more than well in the language of Camões.
He remembers that Portuguese was his first language. “When I went to pre-primary school, I didn’t understand anything they said in English,” says the Luso-American, who says he owes his proficiency in the language to his paternal grandparents, Joaquim and Maria Celeste Louro, from Hartford, and to his maternal ones, Leonardo and Zita Teresa, from Chicopee, Massachusetts. For more information, go to: www.campfiretechnology.com
