Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The real issue is, can you find a niche that is not overcrowded? Every niche is so crowded. Doing advertising is not easy because keywords cost so much money. Maybe you were getting traffic from pee pads and potty training. Even that traffic, by now, is super expensive.

What’s intriguing is that you were introducing a new solution to that problem. Your organic traffic was discovering a new solution to a known problem.

Natalie Youn: Right.

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Colors: Wine Country, Aerial I

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Wine Country, Aerial I

Wine Country, Aerial I | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 8  x 8, On Paper

Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to get to a little bit of a methodology here. Oftentimes, you do get positive bias or negative bias. It sounds like you were getting a false negative in this case where you were convinced about your own pain point, but the people you were talking to were giving you false negatives. But you still went ahead. Was there a segmentation error?

Natalie Youn: There definitely was.

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services and Scaled Using Content Marketing

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

You have heard me discuss bootstrapping using services quite a lot. With Kinetic Data CEO John Sundberg’s story from 2014, we also take on another important key strategy for customer acquisition: content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised and in what kind of circumstances?

John Sundberg: I’m currently in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where our office is. I was born in Minneapolis. I’ve been in Minnesota all of my life. My wife is from Connecticut. My upbringing was very open-minded. My dad taught positive attitude and sales training and indirectly, I’ve had that positive attitude all my life. He ran his own company. It was a small company. As a result of watching that while growing up, I thought I wanted to work in a big company.

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Cloud Stocks: Adobe Beta Launches its Generative AI Tool – the Firefly

Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) recently reported its first quarter results that outpaced market expectations. Adobe is also venturing into the AI space with the release of its Generative AI engine – the Firefly.

Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 1)

Natalie has done a superb job of positioning a niche product and building a great business starting solo.

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

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to an “Inc. 500” Company in Four Years

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

Co-founder CEO Chris Farrell bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position. After we spoke in 2014, Tallie became a part of Emburse in 2017.

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

Chris Farrell: I was born in San Francisco. I was basically born and raised in the Bay Area, mostly down on the peninsula. I got my start in my career with Arthur Andersen as an accountant. Then I worked my way up through the accounting ranks and eventually was a Controller of a public company and a CFO of a public company. Along the way, having been steeped in technology in the Bay Area, I set out on the latest part of my journey, which is running a software company.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very wide range of use cases. It sounds like you are going to market as a platform company.

Brian Sathianathan: Correct, but we work with the appropriate service providers. We also build accelerators on top. If you look at a lot of the low-code platforms, they are purely platforms. It’s the empty canvass problem. Over the last seven to eight years, we have abstracted a lot of knowledge across industries.