Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $13M in Niche E-commerce

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  We continue to be bullish about niche e-commerce as a category to build sustainable businesses in. The journey of Pavel Sokolovsky, Co-founder of eComfort.com, is a further illustration of the trend. One year after we spoke in 2014, eComfort.com was acquired by Power Equipment Direct/Ferguson Enterprises.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to $13M in Niche E-commerce

We continue to be bullish about niche e-commerce as a category to build sustainable businesses in. The journey of Pavel Sokolovsky, Co-founder of eComfort.com, is a further illustration of the trend. In 2015, eComfort.com was acquired by Power Equipment Direct/Ferguson Enterprises. Sramana: Pavel, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from?

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 7)

Sramana: How does the supply chain work in your industry? Where is the margin getting eroded? Pavel Sokolovsky: Here is my version of how the industry came to be. In the 1950s and 1960s, the manufacturers wanted to have national exposure for their products. This required boots on the ground to install and service the

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 6)

Sramana: How do you handle merchandising? Merchandising involves building relationships with suppliers, determining what products to bring on, what products to create deals around, and how to position them with consumers. Pavel Sokolovsky: Merchandising is an interesting term. In a traditional sense we did not do much of it. It just happened as a by-product

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you do in terms of sell-through? How much of the inventory that you invest in is able to be liquidated? Pavel Sokolovsky: I would love to say all of it but there have been some decisions that turned out to be less than ideal. Eventually we have been able to sell all

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 4)

Sramana: This is very similar to how you probably manage CPC [cost-per-click] campaigns with Google AdWords. Pavel Sokolovsky: The high level logic is the same. You have to know how much a data object is worth and when to stop spending.

Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 3)

Sramana: Our audience is very familiar with price comparison engines as consumers and as businesses. The new perspective you are bringing is the experience of working with price comparison engines as an e-commerce site. You said that you submit your site and a structured data set to the price comparison engine. I thought that price

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 2)

Sramana: What specific steps did you take to get the business launched? How did you acquire your customer base? Pavel Sokolovsky: We put up a website using open source software. I had a bit of a technical and development background. Victor took on the challenge of accurately describing the products on our site. He did

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