Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit: Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You sold from bootstrapped directly to exit right? Jay Perkins: Right. When you’re building a business, it’s not easy. You can live and die with the day-to-day. Something good happens and you’re on cloud nine. Then a customer gets a damaged product. Sramana Mitra: What kind of exit price did you get for

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit: Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you plug Kabbage into your financing process? Jay Perkins: That was probably about four or five years in. Sramana Mitra: So for four years, you operated as a fully-bootstrapped company? Jay Perkins: Yes, it was tough. We’d be out of the most popular SKUs for four to five months

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit: Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do? You said you started a company on the BigCommerce platform? Jay Perkins: I started a business called Kettlebell Kings while I was still employed at BigCommerce. Kettlebells are basically fitness equipment. Along with my co-founders, we would hold meetings for a year and a half leading up to when

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit: Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings (Part 1)

There are roll-ups of e-commerce brands going on right now. This case study delves into one such that has exited into a roll-up effort. Jay Perkins currently runs Living.Fit which produces digital workouts, fitness education courses, and fitness equipment. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what

Read Full Article »

Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When did the Japan hospital deal happen? David Liu: This was around 2014. It started in 2012. It was a pretty long cycle. With the funding, we opened up our Japan office. We hired five people. Sramana Mitra: Was this a use case that you were then going to sell to other hospitals?

Read Full Article »

Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens after 2011? David Liu: Around 2015, we had the first investor. We had a high-net-worth individual who was interested in investing in the business. Sramana Mitra: How did that person get involved? How did you find him? David Liu: His son had just started a new e-commerce business and went

Read Full Article »

Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007 when you put together the appliance, how many customers did you get? How much were they paying on average? David Liu: By 2007, we’d won Nokia. Nokia started deploying us globally. We also got Juniper Networks. Sramana Mitra: This is still just you? David Liu: Yes. Sramana Mitra: Fantastic!

Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these customers? David Liu: They came to us. They found our website. Sramana Mitra: Google search? David Liu: Yes. SIP is the industry standard for VoIP and PBX basically means phone system. I remember if you type SIP PBX, we would come up on the first page.