Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Once you had the Series A, what was the next major inflection point? What strategic moves did you make to get to that? Jeremy Swift: I would say it was about just further refinement of what our ICP was and figuring out go-to-market too. That was a hard thing to navigate. It took

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get your first customer? Jeremy Swift: By scratching, clawing, begging, and pleading. We had a pretty great wealth of relationships. Sramana Mitra: That was my question. Did you go back to those relationships? When you have domain experience, you also have relationships in a category. It’s easier to sell into

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was recently talking to the founder of HubSpot. His observation when they started was that people were trying to do inbound marketing by starting blogs and then tying together some level of CRM. He said that nobody had an integrated solution, so he chose to build one. None of the categories that

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were getting ready to start something else, but you wanted to develop some sales chops. Where did you do that? Jeremy Swift: I actually told this mentor that he’s crazy. I spent the next year or two warring against that. I finally came back around and this mentor said, “You got to

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 2)

Jeremy Swift: I worked full-time during the day. I started waning on college. I was talking to advisors and told them about it. An advisor in the Comm department and another from the business department both sat down with me and said, “We understand your personality and what you’re interested in pursuing. We’re going to

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 1)

A very effective way to dance the entrepreneurial Waltz is to do a bootstrapped company first, sell it, and then do another with a more ambitious agenda. Jeremy’s journey is a great case study in this method. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to Exit Discussion with David Lambert, Right Side Capital Management

If you have been bootstrapping and think you are ready for investors, you need to learn how investors think. First, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Then, start looking for entrepreneur – investor fit. Today, I introduce you to David Lambert of Right Side Capital Management. David Lambert is Managing

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 6)

Neal Taparia: Then we acquired the next biggest site in the space which was called CitationMachine. Later on, we acquired the biggest international site in UK and Australia following that same playbook of building relationships to eventually lead to an acquisition. By 2016, we were reaching 30 million students across the globe, primarily in Western-educated

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