Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was recently talking to the founder of HubSpot. His observation when they started was that people were trying to do inbound marketing by starting blogs and then tying together some level of CRM. He said that nobody had an integrated solution, so he chose to build one. None of the categories that

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6 Udemy Courses on How To Build a Startup for an Early Exit

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. There are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on your hard work.

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were getting ready to start something else, but you wanted to develop some sales chops. Where did you do that? Jeremy Swift: I actually told this mentor that he’s crazy. I spent the next year or two warring against that. I finally came back around and this mentor said, “You got to

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 2)

Jeremy Swift: I worked full-time during the day. I started waning on college. I was talking to advisors and told them about it. An advisor in the Comm department and another from the business department both sat down with me and said, “We understand your personality and what you’re interested in pursuing. We’re going to

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Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 1)

A very effective way to dance the entrepreneurial Waltz is to do a bootstrapped company first, sell it, and then do another with a more ambitious agenda. Jeremy’s journey is a great case study in this method. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 6)

Neal Taparia: Then we acquired the next biggest site in the space which was called CitationMachine. Later on, we acquired the biggest international site in UK and Australia following that same playbook of building relationships to eventually lead to an acquisition. By 2016, we were reaching 30 million students across the globe, primarily in Western-educated

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the monetization strategy, it sounds like you needed advertisers through the ad networks who were going after the student demographics. Neal Taparia: That’s correct. Sramana Mitra: Were there ad networks specifically focused on that demographic or were you just working with various ad networks and finding the segment match with

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we step through the journey.  Neal Taparia: When we started working on it full-time, I had mentioned that we benefited from a lot of organic growth. What was really interesting is as we focused on it full-time, we were able to understand all these ways to increase ad revenue.