Sramana Mitra: What else did you do in that incubation mode? What other company or projects did you do? Chris Folayan: We were in the incubation mode throughout OCFX. We did Guru Country and we had an auto dealer’s website where dealers could create their own site for their dealerships. It’s more of a template
Sramana Mitra: If I got it right, you bought BustedTees at $4 million in 2011 and got it up to $8 million in 2013. Adam Schwartz: Yes. Sramana Mitra: You sold it at that point? Adam Schwartz: We were growing through this customer acquisition program. We had done a lot of work to get our
Sramana Mitra: You were based out in the Bay Area? Chris Folayan: I was based in San Jose. Sramana Mitra: What was the duration of the web design company? Chris Folayan: I was with it for 10 years. We worked for pretty much all the Top Fortune 500 companies in the Bay Area. We also
Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of how you would do this buyout? What proposal was on the table and how did you do the financial engineering of this buyout? Adam Schwartz: It was somewhat complicated actually. In all honesty, my partner Josh orchestrated it because he was already at IAC. Effectively, IAC owed Josh
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We covered Mall for Africa some time back in TLEC. Here we trace their entrepreneurial journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Chris Folayan: I’m from Nigeria.
Sramana Mitra: How did the company grow? How far did you get? Adam Schwartz: It’s a while ago now, so it’s hard to remember exactly. I worked on it from 2009 to 2011. We definitely had thousands of SKUs of textiles and we’ve had hundreds of suppliers and thousands of designers who were using this
Adam Schwartz: While all this was happening, the woman I was working with had some interaction with that PR agency. After exhanging ideas, we came upon the pain point of being a sustainable fashion designer. There was a sustainable fashion movement. A lot of people in fashion wanted to make sustainable choices, but everything that came after making those
Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How big is this company? Where are you going from here? What does the market landscape look like? David Stubenvoll: We’re 115 people. We’re north of $20 million in revenue. We introduced a number of new products. Up until last year, all we sold was Wowza streaming engine. We