Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Niche E-Commerce Business to $54M and Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Dara Greaney bootstrapped BuyAutoParts to $54 million in profitable revenue and sold the company to private equity. Yet another story of success in the niche e-commerce domain. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Niche E-Commerce Business BuyAutoParts to Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Dara Greaney bootstrapped BuyAutoParts to $54 million in profitable revenue and sold the company to private equity. Yet another story of success in the niche e-commerce domain. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: LED Light Expert CEO Dara Greaney (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you do on the cash flow management side? Dara Greaney: We finance a lot of it ourselves. We use a third-party company called Resolve. It’s a spin-off of a popular payment platform for B2C. People like the idea of not having to take the risk online. For larger companies, we do

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: LED Light Expert CEO Dara Greaney (Part 1)

Dara spoke with us some years back on his previous venture. This time, he has switched from B2C to B2B and brings insights on the nuances of that sector. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the new company that you’re doing.

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2015, where did you finish in terms of revenue level and in terms of other business metrics? Dara Greaney: Last year, we did $54 million. That was 15% growth. We’ve been profitable every year. We shipped a record 220,000 shipments last year. I think we sold about 22,000 different

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have for executing this $18 million business in 2010? Dara Greaney: I have to go back and pull the numbers, but it wasn’t a big staff. We were keeping it pretty lean. We probably had about 30 people and about 5 or 10 on the phone doing order processing.

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the average deal size? These are pretty high-ticket items, yes? Dara Greaney: Yes, they’re pretty high-ticket items. We are looking at the $350 to $450 range, which was good because it was so cumbersome for us to get them out the door. Every order has five touch points, but we didn’t

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the inventory strategy at that point? Dara Greaney: We had inventory as much as we could because we weren’t really getting a lot of traction with people drop-shipping. If you placed a PO, a month later, you get the parts. Nobody really kept a ton of stuff on stock. It was

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