If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Dara bootstrapped BuyAutoParts to $54 million in profitable revenue and sold the company to private equity. Yet another story of success in the niche e-commerce domain. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,
David Braun: The next challenge was when the customer acquisition cost was starting to double every year. Since we were now working with the platforms, there were a few challenges to initiate the major change in the release. In a year, we were producing 3,000 to 4,000 products. We had to make a decision on whether
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Pierre and Fred Guelen have bootstrapped a very significant company from The Netherlands using the bootstrapping using services principle. Read on and learn how. Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start at the very beginning of your personal journeys. One of you please start by telling us
David Braun: Then the new threat to the business came into the scene. A lot of web designers started to fear that TemplateMonster will kill the custom web design market. They were saying, “You don’t have to use the template because it’s a bad practice. You’d better order the custom design service.” This was how
Sramana Mitra: I wanted to ask you about location and where you’re building your team. Where is the bulk of the organisation? Dave Copps: We’re in Dallas, Texas. Sramana Mitra: Everything is in Dallas, Texas? Dave Copps: We do have satellite offices. We have people in San Francisco, DC, New York, and London. Sramana Mitra:
Sramana Mitra: How did these people find you? David Braun: Basically, because of the forums. I was very active. Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome. David Braun: But you know what, out of this $70,000, $60,000 were fraud and our account was frozen because it was all from stolen credit card numbers. We had to shut down the processing.
Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? Dave Copps: We are growing rapidly. In 2015, we grew 300%. I think it was our breakout year. We are already seeing that growth continue into this quarter. Sramana Mitra: What kind of range are we talking? Is this now a $10 million company or a $20 million company?
Sramana Mitra: You were still in Ukraine? This is happening while you were still in Ukraine? David Braun: Yes, I was in Ukraine. I had shares in that, so I was a co-founder. He was finding the prospects while my job was to organise the production. During this seven months of completing the project, we recruited