Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit more about the Facebook outreach? What did you learn? What have you learned about doing the Facebook outreach? Whom do you target? Gene Caballero: We target landscaping professionals on a geocoding basis. We are able to get those down to about $3 or $4 a click. That

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Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to reach the $1 million annual revenue level? Gene Caballero: We did that in 2015. Sramana Mitra: This is revenue – not gross merchandise value, right? Gene Caballero: Yes.

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to scrape and convince enough Craigslist lawn mowing people so that you could launch the service? Gene Caballero: It took about three weeks to a month of calling. For vendors, it’s free. There’s not any cost associated. We knew that if we were calling these professionals and

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Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you start this as a bootstrapped company? Gene Caballero: Yes. We aggregated about $100,000 between the co-founders. We blew that by paying a custom shop to build us a website and a couple of apps. After about a year and a half of not getting what we want, they turned over a

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Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  This is a fantastic story of a founder duo bootstrapping with a paycheck, now growing from $5M to $15M in one year, with a virtual team of freelancers. Your classic 21st century internet business. No outside financing whatsoever! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning

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Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to productize everything? When you got this $100,000 plus deal, was it already productized? Mack Sundaram: We were about 70% there. It was something that they could implement right away and certain things that they wanted that I didn’t have, I agreed to build it out for

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Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground? Mack Sundaram: Being in a sales role, I had the privilege of having worked with companies. I personally have to find ways to solve this problem of blackbox sales. I used to experiment with different techniques. I hit upon something that started working for me.

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Bootstrapping Decisively to $5M+ in Revenue: Mack Sundaram, CEO of RainmakerForce (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you solve it precisely? Mack Sundaram: That’s the company I started in 2015. Sales people talk to prospects every time. Back in the day, people would just believe that. Now we verify every deal with the prospects. We actually ask the prospects, “Do you feel that this is the right solution

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