If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Nick has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on. You’ll learn a lot. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of
Sramana Mitra: How big a company do you think you can build? Obviously, you probably have a sense of the total market that you can access. What is the size of that market? Gene Caballero: The landscaping industry is about a $9 billion a year industry. Our TAM is almost limitless. In 2019, we want
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit more about the Facebook outreach? What did you learn? What have you learned about doing the Facebook outreach? Whom do you target? Gene Caballero: We target landscaping professionals on a geocoding basis. We are able to get those down to about $3 or $4 a click. That
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to reach the $1 million annual revenue level? Gene Caballero: We did that in 2015. Sramana Mitra: This is revenue – not gross merchandise value, right? Gene Caballero: Yes.
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to scrape and convince enough Craigslist lawn mowing people so that you could launch the service? Gene Caballero: It took about three weeks to a month of calling. For vendors, it’s free. There’s not any cost associated. We knew that if we were calling these professionals and
Sramana Mitra: Did you start this as a bootstrapped company? Gene Caballero: Yes. We aggregated about $100,000 between the co-founders. We blew that by paying a custom shop to build us a website and a couple of apps. After about a year and a half of not getting what we want, they turned over a
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a fantastic story of a founder duo bootstrapping with a paycheck, now growing from $5M to $15M in one year, with a virtual team of freelancers. Your classic 21st century internet business. No outside financing whatsoever! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning
Sramana Mitra: Besides the roughly $2 million you raised, did you raise any other funding? Neil Vaswani: We had some angel funding throughout the way at different points. Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of money that you’ve raised? Neil Vaswani: Probably around $3 million or so. Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue run