620th Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 20 Minutes: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 620th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 20 minutes, on Thursday, October 5, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Featured Videos

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about traffic for the Shopify website. What strategy did you follow to drive traffic?

Hannah Fastov: After we launched our Shopify website, we started to engage with a digital advertising agency. I worked closely with them to develop this strategy of how we are going to get people to our website. We focused on Instagram and Facebook, more Facebook at that time. What we learned is that, like you mentioned earlier, who our customer was. It’s so important to define your demographic. For us, we felt like we were all over the place.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Art.com First, Raised $30M Later

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

Art.com Co-founder Josh Chodniewicz bootstrapped for 10 years before raising a $30 million first round of funding. Read on to learn more about his journey.

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

Josh Chodniewicz: I was born in New Jersey. I am the oldest of seven kids. My parents had seven kids in nine years.

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Video FAQs

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The positioning was as a gym bag.

Hannah Fastov: We started as a gym bag. Our first trade show and our first target demo was either to the fitness instructor who was teaching four different classes all over the place who was always on the go. We also targeted the avid gym goer who is going to the gym and then straight to work or vice versa. Once we started to sell the bag, I learned that it was so much more than that. A lot of people were using it for the gym but also for travel, baby bag, or tennis bag. We started to evolve into more of a lifestyle accessories brand.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M ARR

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

This conversation with AIScreen CEO and Co-founder Nikita Sherbina is a classic bootstrapping story with a very small team to serious revenue.

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?

Nikita Sherbina: I was born and raised in Ukraine. I moved to the United States about six years ago without knowing anything about this land.

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Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 2)

Hannah Fastov: For six months, I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea. In January of 2016, I googled “New York handbag designer”. I found my designer who had been with me since the beginning. She helped me commercialize my ideas. She took what I wanted, made it into a bag that had the potential to sell, and created everything that we needed to send to a manufacturer.

October Udemy Coupons for Tech Startup Courses

Our time-tested 1Mby1M methodology for building technology startups has been packaged into short courses on Udemy as a part of our aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally.

We are offering you up to 85% off of the following Udemy courses this month, spotlighting our most informative and inspirational case studies of noteworthy technology startups.

These coupons will expire on October 31, 2023, so be sure to enroll today!

Bootstrapping:

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later with Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MOCT2023BTS

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Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 1)

Excellent story of a fashion e-commerce entrepreneur bringing to market a range of new bags.
Positioning, customer acquisition, business development, partnerships – many topics are dealt with in great detail in this conversation. Enjoy!

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?