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.
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
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
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
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. [Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India] InMobi is probably going to be the first billion dollar global technology company built out of India. Read their thrilling entrepreneurial journey. Sramana: Amit, let’s go back to the very beginning
Sramana: You also get a lot of auction traffic from India. What do Indian’s buy? Alexander Zacke: They buy pretty much everything except European furniture. They don’t really like it. They buy a lot of Indian art, miniatures, and contemporary Indian art. I see the same trend happen in Morocco, Argentina, Mexico, and Turkey, where
Sramana: There is a very compelling element to your story. You are going to have access to the larger ticket items that are the economic drivers of a traditional auction house. However, traditional auction houses do not have the ability to scale. Auctionata has the ability to scale much faster. Alexander Zacke: That is exactly
Sramana: What is your commission structure? Alexander Zacke: Our standard fees are 20% from the seller and 20% from the buyer. Our fees are negotiable, depending on the value of the consignment. The overall commission we receive will likely be less than 30%. Sramana: You said that you raised some money to build this company.