The Power of Bootstrapping: Achieving Small Exits for Capital-Efficient Startups

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. There are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on your hard work.

One type of exit is under $50 million, and to achieve that, your strategy should be to build a capital-efficient company that shows product-market fit in an efficient, bootstrapped manner.

That capital-efficient strategy is required for all stakeholders to make money when harvesting through smaller exits.

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Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an E-commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

There are roll-ups of e-commerce brands going on right now. This case study delves into one such that has exited into a roll-up effort.

Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings, currently runs Living.Fit which produces digital workouts, fitness education courses, and fitness equipment.

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

Jay Perkins: I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In 2004, I moved to Austin, Texas to go to college at the University of Texas. Pretty soon after arriving in Austin, I just fell in love with it. I felt like this was an incredible place to be in.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Comet ML CEO Gideon Mendels (Part 3)

Gideon Mendels: If you think about the managers, they’re mostly looking for this visibility. If I use the software engineering analogy, as engineering managers we are able to look at everyone’s pull request, commit history. We have full visibility on who’s working at what. A lot of these managers rely on self-reported progress.

With Comet, we provide them with this full visibility. As a manager, you can see every result of every experiment by every team member. The main goal there is that those managers can support their team members and guide them in understanding what’s working and what’s not working.

Video FAQs

Exploring the Trend of AI Startups: Opportunities, Lessons, and White Space

One of the single hottest trends in technology startups is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and various other nuances are being constantly applied to problems up and down the alleyways of all industries, from manufacturing, to retail, to education, to drug discovery.

All the methodology building blocks you have been learning through the 1Mby1M entrepreneurship fundamentals courses apply.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Facebook Ads to $5M

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Facebook gets a tremendous bad rap for its many nefarious side effects. Numerous small businesses, however, have been possible because of Facebook’s incredible Ad engine. Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker have bootstrapped using Facebook ads to over $5M.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What is the story leading up to this? We’ll do Laurie-Anne as well in that mode.

Britt Baker: I was born in Santa Monica, California, and then moved to Idaho when I was five. I was raised in Idaho but did most of my schooling on the East Coast. I went to boarding school, college, and grad school all on the East Coast.

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Cisco Leverages AI for Hybrid Work Environments

Global networking solutions provider Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) announced its second quarter results that outpaced market expectations. Cisco is focusing on the hybrid workspace by adding AI capabilities into its existing offerings portfolio.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Comet ML CEO Gideon Mendels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Do you go to market as a platform company?

Gideon Mendels: I guess it depends on your definition. The Community Edition plays a big role as individual contributors get excited about it and recognize the value it can bring to them and their team.

Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you are calling it the Community Edition but not an open source product. It is a free product but not open source?

April Udemy Coupons for Tech Startup Courses

As a part of our aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally, we have packaged our proven 1Mby1M methodology for building technology startups into short courses on Udemy.

In addition to offering you up to 85% off all of our Udemy courses this month, we are introducing three new courses. Each contains informative and inspirational case studies of startups and entrepreneurs who have successfully navigated the Cyber Security, FinTech, and IoT domains:

How to Build a Cyber Security Startup with Sramana Mitra

How to Build a FinTech Startup with Sramana Mitra

How to Build an IoT Startup with Sramana Mitra

Here are the up to 85% off coupon codes for all of our courses on Udemy. These coupons expire on April 30, 2023, so enroll today!

Bootstrapping:

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later with Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MAPR2023BTS

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