Bootstrapping a Generative AI Venture Using Services: Abhinav Girdhar, Founder CEO of Appy Pie (Part 1)

Abhinav has built a $15M+ ARR business by bootstrapping using services. Of his three products, one is a GenerativeAI design tool. Read on for more nuance.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Abhinav, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of background?

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Catching Up On Readings: Global Supply Chain Top 25

This annual ranking feature from Gartner ranks the leading supply chain organizations and identifies the underlying trends that drove their performance. Schneider Electric was at the top, followed by Cisco Systems, Colgate-Palmolive, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson. New to this year’s list was NVIDIA. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Right. What else do you want to share with me?

Justin Grooms: I just want to share how excited I am for where I think commerce is going around identity. So much has changed in e-commerce over the last decade, but one of the things that hasn’t changed too much, unfortunately, is curated, specialized shopping experiences.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. So, the customer, however, has to do the first sale for Bolt to kick in.

Justin Grooms: The customer needs to create a Bolt account somewhere in our network.

Sramana Mitra: The customer acquires the consumer. And then connects into the Bolt network and then Bolt provides additional identity data and more marketability to that customer. But the customer acquisition is happening at the retailer.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk me through the business model evolution of the business? This is probably before your time, but when the company was selling the checkout software, were they charging on a Software as a Service basis?

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, Bolt started with a software product for online checkouts and sold it to small retailers. Small retailers came on board and used Bolt as their e-commerce checkout system. Then when consumers were buying through the Bolt checkout process, they were offered the opportunity to join the Bolt network.

This is how Bolt developed this network of consumers and then gradually went upmarket and got larger and larger retailers to come into this checkout system and also access the consumer base of Bolt. That’s the story that you’re telling.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the technology that were you bringing to market with Bolt? What were you looking for commercialization?

Justin Grooms: We had an initial all-in-one checkout product that we were selling to SMB merchants. Bolt had good success with that.

Sramana Mitra: A point-of-sale checkout product?