Services companies are easy to bootstrap, but often, they grow slowly in the beginning. How do you accelerate? This discussion is about the levers of acceleration.
Sramana Mitra: Category creation is interesting. Let’s talk about category creation. Ryan Millman: Undigital is a category creator. We’ve invented what we call in-package personalization. Category creation is extremely different. When you go out to a company as a category creator, nobody has you in the budget, right?
Sramana Mitra: Okay. All right. So I understand your business. Where do you go from here? Ryan Millman: I spend all my time focusing on Undigital, my newest endeavor. It is a little bit related, but it is more of a pure technology company. From a personal perspective, when the companies get big and mature, a lot
Sramana Mitra: Relatively soon after that [around 2004], this market started to develop, including with venture funded competitors, right? There were a number of very successful venture funded competitors that hit this market. How did you deal with that competition?
Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to help my audience learn from what you’ve done. What is the rationale for having separate companies?
Sramana Mitra: How did you build that relationship? That is a journey story that would be interesting.
Sramana Mitra: Was there a business model? Were you monetizing? Ryan Millman: Yes. Initially, the business model was based on ad revenue – everything in 1999 was ad revenue-based. I figured out how to tie in with some APIs to one of the first digital photograph manufacturers. People could then order the photographs they were
Ryan has built a portfolio of bootstrapped businesses over the last 25 years that adds up to over $50M in revenue. He discusses the strategies and nuances, pivots and positioning, and more.