Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to Exit, Bootstrapped Again, then Raised VC Money

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

Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace, had bootstrapped her first company to $20 million in revenue from St. Louis when we spoke in 2016. Her second company, also from St. Louis, was venture-funded and had crossed $10 million in revenue. Awesome entrepreneur, inspiring woman! You can also listen to our conversation as a podcast here.

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

Stephanie Leffler: I am from Northern Virginia in Fairfax. I was actually born and raised there. Ultimately, I went to school at Washington and Lee University. I found my way to St. Louis as part of my entrepreneurial journey. I’ve lived here ever since.

>>>

Featured Videos

Roundtable Recap: October 13 – Spotlight on Italian Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Giuseppe Donvito, Partner at P101 Ventures based in Milan. It was a wonderful conversation on Italian startups.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Those examples that you gave of a B2C venture out of India that is doing global business, how common is that across your portfolio?

Anirudh Damani: One out of five businesses on the B2C side is either looking overseas or getting inbound interest from overseas.

Sramana Mitra: Is that primarily in EdTech? Is there a category trend?

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders on Internet of Things: Ordr CEO Greg Murphy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the IoT device market right now? How many IoT devices are out there? How much of that is secured?

Greg Murphy: It’s everything from a small sensor that costs a few cents all the way up to multi-million dollar manufacturing systems and medical systems. The number of medical IoT devices is growing by 22% year over year. The number of IoT devices greatly outnumbers the number of people on the planet. The question about these devices is how vulnerable they are. That depends a lot on what the device is, where is it connected and whether any compensating controls are put in place.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Affiliate Marketing

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

Affiliate Marketing is at the heart of many wonderful bootstrapping stories. It’s inexpensive to get going and profitable quickly, and if managed well, can scale substantially. Zeeto Founder CEO Stephan Goss had bootstrapped a traffic arbitrage business to $42 million in 2015 revenue when we spoke in 2016. If you are working on an affiliate marketing / lead generation type of business, this is a useful conversation.

You can listen to our entire interview [2:10 – 33:50] from our 1Mby1M YouTube channel:

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

Stephan Goss: I was born in Switzerland, pretty close to Zurich. I came to the US in 2007.

>>>

593rd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 593rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 13, 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!

593rd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 20 Minutes: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 593rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 20 minutes, on Thursday, October 13, 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!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have made 27 investments. Let’s talk about some of the Artha case studies.

Anirudh Damani: We could look at HobSpace. All 27 deals we have done were referred to us. We’re getting so much deal flow these days that it’s very difficult for my team to keep up even with the best ERPs and systems we are using. We’ve added a filter where for every investment we do, we only take a look at a deck if it’s referred by somebody on our network.