Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re talking 2010. What is the split in the business? How much are you selling through retail? How much are you selling online? Eyal Levy: Back then, the online business was about 20%. Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2011? Eyal Levy: We saw that the model of the store worked. In October of

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Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You had IBM paying the bills and you were basically hatching a company on the side. You had the time and runway to do that. Colin Earl: As anyone working 40 hours a week. Sramana Mitra: Tell me about what you were doing on the side. Colin Earl: I was working on an

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Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a product that you are doing under your own brand? Eyal Levy: For the first line, we had to develop the product ourselves. We had to develop a different inner fabric to make it more durable and to comply with the regulations here. It’s our own brand. I started the brand.

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Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 1)

Colin’s company has to compete with Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, and Apttus with a bootstrapped business. Read on to learn how he does so. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Colin Earl: I was born in London

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Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 1)

We’ve been covering new niche brands that have successfully been built either purely with e-commerce or with an online-offline combination. Yogibo is a bean bags company that has scaled nicely in its niche. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in

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Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One of the results of this increased competition is that Google keyword pricing goes up significantly. Ricky Joshi: Absolutely. Sramana Mitra: You’re a high-ticket item, so I suppose you have lots of headroom to spend on customer acquisition. Still, everybody in that space does have that kind of headroom, so the bidding war

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Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that from your Google PPC, you would target only the region that is close to your manufacturing and distribution centers? Ricky Joshi: Yes. Sramana Mitra: How much of this did you launch with in 2011? Ricky Joshi: Are you asking which market? Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling your own branded mattress? All this calculation that you did about the raw materials, did it lead you to the decision to do your own branded mattress? Ricky Joshi: We were always going to create our own brand. That was part of the whole operation. You look at the history of

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