From Student Entrepreneur to a $15 Million Revenue Ultralight Business: Stephanie Madesh, CEO of Kalon Clothing (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were you selling this under private label, or was it still retail?

Stephanie Madesh: We were selling it as the Kalon brand. It was our own design. We were still a boutique. But if you can imagine Forever21 when they started, they had their own label and all the labels that they carried.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very common in the fashion business. They start with selling other people’s brands and then pick up categories in which they offer their own brands. Your strategy is exactly in line with what retail companies do.

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From Student Entrepreneur to a $15 Million Revenue Ultralight Business: Stephanie Madesh, CEO of Kalon Clothing (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2010?

Stephanie Madesh: We doubled that year. We were at the $300,000 level. That was two-fold. We had started a print-on-demand. That had its own website. That drove the other $150,000 in sales.

Sramana Mitra: What were you printing on demand? T-shirts?

549th Roundtable Recording with Jukka Alanen, PagerDuty

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health (Part 5)

Kristen Valdes: During that time, I had given birth to my second child Bailey. She was born with a very significant auto-immune condition. She had a near fatal incident because two EMR systems couldn’t communicate with one another. At that point, I realized that it didn’t matter how much expertise I had gained in healthcare. I knew how to navigate the system. I couldn’t do it on behalf of my own family.

That’s when I became the Excel-plotting mom trying to figure out if she could have been diagnosed faster, could we have avoided this near-death complication if we had all the information at our fingertips. I left and I launched b.well. We need to take the friction and fragmentation out of healthcare and deliver seamless and simple user experiences.

From Student Entrepreneur to a $15 Million Revenue Ultralight Business: Stephanie Madesh, CEO of Kalon Clothing (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was the age group you were trying to go after your own age group?

Stephanie Madesh: Yes. I was going after the 20- to 30-year-old market back then. As it evolved, my customers base were more in the 20- to 60-year old category.

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire the customers?

Roundtable Recap: October 7 – Exit Strategy – Further Guidance

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Jukka Alanen, SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development at PagerDuty, to discuss Exit Strategy.

V-REAP

For the entrepreneur pitch, we had Yugandhar Dodda from Hyderabad, India, pitch V-REAP, a rural skill development social venture.

eelspace

Then David Orok from Uyo, Nigeria, pitched eelspace, a freelancer marketplace for Nigeria.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Significant Software Company from Australia

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

When we spoke in 2015, Emagine CEO Dave Peters had managed to bootstrap a significant software company from Australia. The focus was on TELCO churn management, and the customer base was primarily Australian, Asian, and African. Read this interview to learn more of the nuances. In September 2017 Emagine was acquired by Comviva.

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

Dave Peters: I’m Australian. I grew up in a little town of 8,000 people, about five hours west of Sydney. It was a farming community and my father was an Anglican minister. That’s a pretty unlikely starting point for an entrepreneur.

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549th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 549th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 7, 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!