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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2015, where did you finish in terms of revenue level and in terms of other business metrics? Dara Greaney: Last year, we did $54 million. That was 15% growth. We’ve been profitable every year. We shipped a record 220,000 shipments last year. I think we sold about 22,000 different
Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This story illustrates a couple of interesting strategic moves that have resulted in growth acceleration for Velocify. These kinds of strategic moves are critical to the evolution of a business. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from?
Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have for executing this $18 million business in 2010? Dara Greaney: I have to go back and pull the numbers, but it wasn’t a big staff. We were keeping it pretty lean. We probably had about 30 people and about 5 or 10 on the phone doing order processing.
Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Now what? You’re in 2016. How big is the company revenue-wise and what do yo want to do with it? Do you want to go public? Do you want to go public in the US market? Fred Guelen: We definitely first want to secure further growth for the next three to five years.
Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the average deal size? These are pretty high-ticket items, yes? Dara Greaney: Yes, they’re pretty high-ticket items. We are looking at the $350 to $450 range, which was good because it was so cumbersome for us to get them out the door. Every order has five touch points, but we didn’t
Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Where did you get the money to invest? Fred Guelen: That’s always the big secret, isn’t it? I had a very successful law practice and I made a lot of money as a lawyer. I was able to largely finance that with my own equity, and I also took a loan. Pierre Guelen:
Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What did that do to your growth? Between 2000 and 2010, how did the company grow? Pierre Guelen: We’ve always had a steady pace of growth of an average of 20% a year. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to 2010. Are we talking about just one product in the cloud architecture in 2010? Pierre
Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: I imagine that you immediately went and sold the same product to a bunch of other customers. Can you talk about some of the early customers and what kind of price point you sold it at? Pierre Guelen: At the engineering firm, I did my own consultative selling. Here, I needed a sales