Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck from Indiana

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

One Click Ventures Co-founders Angie Stocklin and her husband built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey back in 2016, and hope you will as well. One Click Internet Ventures was acquired by Foster Grant, International in July of 2018.

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

Angie Stocklin: I was born in a small town called Paisley in Indiana. It’s a town of about 2,500. My mom was a teacher and my dad is a farmer and somewhat of an entrepreneur in the fact that farming is a self-employed type of business. My dad and his brothers owned an implement dealership. They sold tractors. I grew up with a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I went to college at the University of Evansville and started studying Psychology. I went on to get my Masters and my educational specialist degree in School Psychology. I worked as a school psychologist for three years before starting One Click.

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Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now?

Todd Schwartz: This year, we’re in the over $400 million range.

Sramana Mitra: When did you go public?

Todd Schwartz: In 2021 on the NYSE. When I walked up to the stock exchange, it was never about financial gain. It’s so funny to me to see OppFi on the banner. This was literally about helping people. I want to make that clear. If financial gain is the reason you’re doing it, your heart and soul won’t be in the business.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $100M from The Netherlands

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

Pierre and Fred Guelen bootstrapped Planon, a very significant company from The Netherlands, using the bootstrapping using services principle. Read this conversation from 2016 to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start at the very beginning of your personal journeys. One of you please start by telling us where you’re from, where you were born, and in what kind of background, and then we’ll do the same thing with the other person.

Pierre Guelen: I’m the CEO of Planon group. Fred is my brother. We were born in The Netherlands in a small town near the German border. We were raised in an entrepreneurial family. My father owned a large building company. He was already the fourth generation in that building company.

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Video FAQs

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about going beyond Illinois? How long did you do just Illinois?

Todd Schwartz: We scale nationally now. What was interesting to me was there were 17 other states that had small-dollar lending laws that we could use. What’s difficult is that each state has its own rules. We started to scale that way. There are 35 states that have payday lending laws, but only 17 have small-dollar lending laws.

Our goal was to provide credit access in a better way and, essentially, eradicate the payday loan. That was our original mission. That’s when I stepped down as CEO. I became Executive Chairman and hired a CEO.

Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 Strategic Tech Trends 2023

This feature from Gartner identifies the top ten strategic technology trends that organizations should explore in 2023. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that?

Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and did API integrations into them. I spent little on technology. I didn’t have a CTO for the first five years. They were all variable costs. I didn’t have to outlay a lot of equity. I was able to grow with a variable cost model.

596th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Julien Pham, Third Culture Capital

Julien Pham is Founder and Managing Director at Third Culture Capital (3CC), a firm focused on investing in the healthcare space.

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Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 3)

Todd Schwartz: The technology wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about lending. I didn’t know any other way to do it except take $100,000 of my own savings and open a one-room office in the north side of Chicago, get a printer, and use Excel to originate loans. I applied for the CILO license. Six months later, I was granted the license. I was getting referrals from the pawnshop.

I made the first 3,000 loans in person by myself. I handed the check to every borrower. I got to know every borrower. I understood why we were better. There were no prepayment penalties. I had to hire people. We were getting so much referral volume. We have such high customer satisfaction. We weren’t really measuring it, but I could just tell by the way people were overjoyed and the referrals we were getting. Our interest rates were much lower. Our payment terms were much more beneficial.