Sramana Mitra: What did that do to your growth? Between 2000 and 2010, how did the company grow? Pierre Guelen: We’ve always had a steady pace of growth of an average of 20% a year. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to 2010. Are we talking about just one product in the cloud architecture in 2010? Pierre
Sramana Mitra: What was the inventory strategy at that point? Dara Greaney: We had inventory as much as we could because we weren’t really getting a lot of traction with people drop-shipping. If you placed a PO, a month later, you get the parts. Nobody really kept a ton of stuff on stock. It was
By Guest Author Soren Petersen More than any other car designer, Chris Bangle understands how to create breakthrough innovation. Often controversial, he has been the ‘lead dog on the sled team,’ exposed to the cold arctic wind of public opinion. At the end of the day, the most sincere form of flattery has been the
Sramana Mitra: I imagine that you immediately went and sold the same product to a bunch of other customers. Can you talk about some of the early customers and what kind of price point you sold it at? Pierre Guelen: At the engineering firm, I did my own consultative selling. Here, I needed a sales
Sramana Mitra: What did you do first to get this thing off the ground? Were there other car parts site at all, or was this the first one that came online? Dara Greaney: The way the auto parts industry grew was everyone started selling their own niche products. If you were in the wheels business, you’d
By Guest Author Soren Petersen The holy grail of building unicorn startups is to look in the right places and to reject the first thousand bad business ideas. The looking part is easy since one needs only to search areas of high market and high technology risk. However, what is the best path to making
Sramana Mitra: We have to capture the story of how you put one foot before the other. You said you started the company right out of school. How did you get it off the ground? What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do and how did you get started? Pierre
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Dara bootstrapped BuyAutoParts to $54 million in profitable revenue and sold the company to private equity. Yet another story of success in the niche e-commerce domain. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,