If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. From setting up a printing machine in the dining room to $23 million in revenue, Mike’s RushOrderTees journey is one of steady, diligent execution. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in
Sramana Mitra: What are some of the inflection points in the business when things started clicking in gear? We’ve talked about one of the key issues which is really turning into this metrics-driven organization. What other inflection points have you experienced in building this business? Josh McCarter: I think there are a few. The early
Sramana Mitra: What is your conclusion about where you wanted to pin your customer acquisition cost? How does that correlate to your lifetime value for your SaaS business? Josh McCarter: All of the benchmark studies say that you need to be north of three times LTV. That seems to be the number where people feel
Sramana Mitra: What happened after you raised the $15 million? How did the business move? What were the strategic moves that you made to get to the next level? Josh McCarter: The major move that we made was, we started investing in sales and marketing. We started building out our team. We took on some larger contracts that,
Sramana Mitra: What did you have in place when you went to raise capital? Josh McCarter: We had a functioning framework of the software. We had about 700 customers and a team of about 30 people. It was, at least, beyond a prototype and proof of concept. The business was doing under $1 million in revenue. We had
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Josh McCarter: Around 2001. Sramana Mitra: What happened then? Josh McCarter: The company’s IPO was successful. After six years, I was looking to do something new. I went and joined a company called Spafinder. It was a travel-based magazine and was call center-oriented. We were trying to turn
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. In 2010, SaaS investors were less rigorous than they are today about unit economics. Josh managed to raise a $15 million Series A and acquired a significant runway to figure out the metrics of his SMB-focused SaaS business. Read more about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make that switch from going indirect to direct? Domingo Guerra: I think it was around 2013 when we were in front of a lot more customers. We started realizing that it is a new space that’s changing very quickly. It’s difficult to train a partner to sell something that’s