Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 3)

Sramana: Does your business model still rely on third party logistics? Tony Ellison: Yes, by and large. We have a lot of 3PL relationships as well as a lot of private brands. Today, we offer over 600,000 items. We are in close to 16 different major categories. We started in CD-ROMs and then moved into

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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  One of the chief bottlenecks of the adoption of online education has been the lack of ability to handle testing in a secure fashion. ProctorU addresses that gap and is growing at a nice clip. Sramana Mitra: Don, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about

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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 2)

Sramana: You decided to go to market with 1,000 of the most popular products in your market segment. Did you buy that inventory? Tony Ellison: No, everything we did was drop shipped. We bootstrapped the business, so our only way of making things work was to partner with a distributor out of Chicago. For example,

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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  The Shoplet case study is interesting because it illustrates how an entrepreneur has bootstrapped a category leading e-commerce venture by trading off margins in favor of minimizing logistical challenges. Sramana: Tony, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where were you born and raised? What

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Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana: I have noticed a couple of trends that are very strong. Zoho is one of the first who did product development in India while selling globally as a SaaS product. I have seen a lot of companies following that model. They don’t even need to have a presence in the U.S. because they sell

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Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana: Given the growth you have been describing and the model you had for expansion, I imagine that everybody was willing to give you money. Who did you select and why? Amit Gupta: Yes. For our next round, we spoke with a lot of potential firms but we ended up taking money from SoftBank. They

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Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you been able to follow that strategy? Amit Gupta: Absolutely. We have remained headquartered in India and have since expanded to pursue the Asian market. After India, we focused on Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. We have since expanded into countries such as Nigeria. We are growing country by country.

Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana: How many people did you have in the company at that point? Amit Gupta: We had four co-founders, and then we had 8 people on our support staff. We had a small team, but when you are starting up a company, every expense is very important. When we ran out of cash, we started

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