Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have the same marketing strategy?

Jonathan Foltz: Yes. Our expertise was definitely Facebook and Instagram. You can do this with influencer marketing. We can go from $10,000 a day to over $300,000 in less than a week. The scalability is unparalleled with Facebook and Instagram.

Sramana Mitra: I guess there are two questions that come from that. Did you have to do buy-one-get-two-free with this new product?

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4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the name of this project?

Kashyap Deorah: Chalo.

Sramana Mitra: How long was that?

Kashyap Deorah: We sold the company in less than a year. After the acquisition, some of us stayed at OpenTable. I left after two years. One important moment there was that OpenTable was a public company. That’s what made it attractive for us to sell that soon.

Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What product were you selling?

Jonathan Foltz: We were selling LED shoes. We could have kept on going. Then we had a problem in China. They didn’t do the proper paper work and they had batteries. They had to recall them and send them back. It was a huge problem. We could have probably made a million to $1.5 million if we didn’t have any of those problems.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting the customers?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping JobNimbus First, Raising Money Later

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

Ben Hodson, Co-founder and CEO of JobNimbus, is a serial entrepreneur with a long experience in bootstrapping and fundraising. Read on to see how he has navigated his journey.

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 did you have?

Ben Hodson: I say that I am from the Seattle area. I was born in Washington State on the east side of the state, but I moved to the west side when I was very young. I went to the University of Washington. I got a degree in business. Then I was interested in computers, so I did a second degree in computer science as well.

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4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long into your independent journey did the acquisition happen?

Kashyap Deorah: Three years.

Sramana Mitra: Then you stayed at Future group for two more years?

Kashyap Deorah: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: In those later two years, did the business change? India was coming online at a very fast pace.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Vantage Circle from Guwahati, India

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

I am always thrilled to do stories of pioneering entrepreneurs building technology startups in remote locations. Anjan Pathak, Co-founder and CTO of Vantage Circle, brings us into the nascent scene in Guwahati, in the northeast Indian state of Assam.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Anjan Pathak: I was born in a small town in North East India. It’s about 50 kilometers from Guwahati. I spent my childhood there. I studied in a very small school.

From there, I went to Guwahati. That is where I met my co-founder Partha Neog. I studied there for two weeks and after that, I went to the engineering school in Nagpur. I spent four years in Nagpur. I graduated and worked for a year and a half in a services company.

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