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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
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
Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What did you do first to get this thing off the ground? Were there other car parts site at all, or was this the first one that came online? Dara Greaney: The way the auto parts industry grew was everyone started selling their own niche products. If you were in the wheels business, you’d
Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: We have to capture the story of how you put one foot before the other. You said you started the company right out of school. How did you get it off the ground? What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do and how did you get started? Pierre