Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Lean and Niche E-commerce Venture

This conversation with Modded Euros Co-founder Sean Dawes from 2019 is a comprehensive discussion on how to bootstrap a niche e-commerce venture with a lean team and effective use of inventory financing. You can listen to the podcast interview here and watch the interview here:

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Sean Dawes: I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I haven’t gone too far away from my hometown as my company is based out of West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is 20 or 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia.

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Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the P&Ls of these Infosys, WiPro, Persistence and various companies that have achieved scale in the services universe, how do the components of the P&L and the margins of these companies compare with the kind of company that you are looking to build?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Right, you’ll learn as you go along. But there will be these three buckets, I think, even when you are a $100M or a $1B company. This is going to be the structure of your company. So the question then is, what is the distribution?

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March 13 – 676th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 676th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 4 p.m. CET / 8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to Pitch and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to Attend to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be

675th 1Mby1M Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: March 6 – Don’t Quit Your Job During Ideation

During this week’s roundtable, we had one entrepreneur pitch and several questions about our Ideation Methodology.

If you are ideating, our methodology suggests that you do NOT quit your job. Do the 1Mby1M curriculum. Attend the roundtables. Join 1Mby1M Premium if you want active mentoring. But do it all in a Bootstrapping with a Paycheck mode.

Harmonia Music Production Studio

As for the pitch, today we had Monideepa Roy from Pune, India pitch Harmonia Music Production Studio.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Feroze, there are a few things that come to mind as I’m listening to you. First and foremost, you talked about delivery constraints and supply constraints in terms of the expertise that give you this moat. You haven’t talked about domain knowledge.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Services, Raised Money and Exited

John Stewart and his co-founder built MapAnything from Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. When we spoke in 2018, he had raised over $40 million in funding, proving that you can build sizable VC-funded SaaS businesses from anywhere. MapAnything was sold to Salesforce in May 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Give us some early story.

John Stewart: I’m from upstate New York. I’m from a middle class background. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My father was in the construction business. He was an architect. I went to school in New England for Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts and graduated in 1997.

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