Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing though. You made this comment that outsourcing is bullshit. That’s absolutely false. There are a lot of ways of succeeding. You have succeeded in one way. There are a lot of other people who have succeeded in other ways. We have case studies of virtual companies with 140

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 4)

Sebastian Petersen: If you want to start an ecommerce company today, it’s very difficult to do it without a lot of funding and thinking big from the very beginning. Today, buying visitors and customers is four times the price it was 10 years ago. You have to think more creatively today. Sramana Mitra: I’d say

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What country did you first go into outside Denmark? Sebastian Petersen: Norway and Sweden. Then we started going south into Germany and France. Sramana Mitra: Was there something different that Norway and Sweden wanted? Sebastian Petersen: Only simple things. Once we started moving out of Scandinavia to Germany and France and especially Eastern

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you tell me how many years are we talking in this mode? When did you move out of your mom’s house to your own apartment? Sebastian Petersen: We only did that for about six months. Sramana Mitra: How much were you doing, revenue-wise, when you moved to the apartment? Sebastian Petersen: I

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All 60 employees work out of Horsens currently. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How far along? What’s the revenue level? Sean Dawes: We’re doing millions in revenue. It’s about focusing on capturing as much market share as possible. There are still a handful competitors that are larger than us. For us, it’s growing as fast as possible while focusing on profitability. My

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about inventory financing? Did you finance it all out of revenue or did you do some sort of bank financing? Sean Dawes: We did a combination of self-financing and bank financing. Sramana Mitra: Could you give us a range of what level of bank financing you used to leverage the company?

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key inflection points? What strategic moves have you made that led to this? Sean Dawes: For us, it was being able to offer similar content generation that we were used to working with when we worked in-house. We launched our own content video series where we’d purchase vehicles and show

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