Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 1)

Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story!

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?

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Catching Up On Readings: Declining Startup Valuations

This feature from TechCrunch analyzes in which sectors valuations of startups are declining the fastest and slowest. SaaS is one sector that is bucking the trend of declining valuations. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As you are looking at this space, what is the scope and scale of the number of startups operating in North America?

Zain Jaffer: I saw 500 startups last year. That’s just what I tracked in my CRM. The number is mind-boggling. With any industry, only a few will make it. I don’t know what the actual number is, but PropTech is becoming a big segment. It’s a niche segment that’s an intersection of FinTech and marketplaces.

Video FAQs

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the PropTech part of your work. You said you’re doing pre-seed and seed in that sector?

Zain Jaffer: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical boundary of this?

Zain Jaffer: We try to stay focused on the US market. We are also open and have done many companies that plan to expand to the US. They may also be based anywhere in the world but they just happen to have US customers. Ideally, the US is the top focus though.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership?

Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to understand what matters to them. When you’re scoping, what workloads are important for them? How are their customers buying? It’s those questions that you want to answer strategically.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 1)

Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital, discusses trends in PropTech.

Sramana Mitra: Our focus today is primarily on the investing that you had recently started. If you want to set some context about your entrepreneurial background, that would be great.

Zain Jaffer: As soon as I discovered computers, I started to mess around, code, and design things. I’ve always been at it trying to build things. Sometimes, it worked out. Most of the time, it doesn’t. I have had a lot of attempts. All you need is to be lucky once. It can change your life completely. I had a big exit. It was $718 million back in 2019 when I started an advertising tech company.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Niche E-commerce Company to $20M

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

Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how CEO Brian Lim built iHeartRaves.

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?

Brian Lim: I was raised in LA County. My parents immigrated here to escape communism in China and Cambodia. I grew up very poor. We bootstrapped our company back in 2010 with $100 and turned it into a $20 million a year company.

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Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian?

Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second.

Sramana Mitra: This is a crowded space. What was so special about HYCU?