Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re still selling completely direct? You’re not working with any of the major system integrators? Matthew Elenjickal: We do. We’re partners with almost every system integrator that you can think of. We work with almost every system integrator out there including Accenture and Genpact . We work with a lot of big software

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Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the process of customer acquisition? Where you reaching out to these customers? Were they reaching out to you? What was the inbound and outbound? What was the go-to-market strategy? Matthew Elenjickal: For those early days, it was still outbound. You go through your Rolodex and some of the companies you work

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Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you did the startup right after your MBA. So did you then bootstrap it to launch this? Whom did you launch it with? Matthew Elenjickal: I started the MBA program fully aware that I wanted to start a company. I was laying the foundation, if you will, when I was doing

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Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  This is a terrific case study of smart execution on a complex domain by an entrepreneurial team. Read on ! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How far along? What’s the revenue level? Sean Dawes: We’re doing millions in revenue. It’s about focusing on capturing as much market share as possible. There are still a handful competitors that are larger than us. For us, it’s growing as fast as possible while focusing on profitability. My

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about inventory financing? Did you finance it all out of revenue or did you do some sort of bank financing? Sean Dawes: We did a combination of self-financing and bank financing. Sramana Mitra: Could you give us a range of what level of bank financing you used to leverage the company?

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key inflection points? What strategic moves have you made that led to this? Sean Dawes: For us, it was being able to offer similar content generation that we were used to working with when we worked in-house. We launched our own content video series where we’d purchase vehicles and show

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The transition from dropship to inventory, how far did you get to dropshipping in terms of gross merchandise volume? Sean Dawes: We did over a million in annual sales before we had to inventory anything. Sramana Mitra: That’s terrific. What did you learn about the customer base? Were they auto shops or were

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