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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Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana: What was your run rate for the $500,000 that you raised? Amit Gupta: We were trying to build our own B2C property, so that also involved marketing money. We had to solicit that money without a defined run rate. We started with some basic promotions. We quickly realized that we had a very new

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Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana: What is Naveen’s background? Amit Gupta: Naveen and I went to IIT together. While I started pursuing my career in software, he decided to join McKinsey in India. He then went off to do his MBA and after his MBA, he joined some startups. When he was looking to move back to India, he

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