Best of Bootstrapping: Freightwise Bootstraps to $33 Million

Freightwise was No. 2 on the Inc. 5000 for 2018. Amazing bootstrapping story from Freightwise CIO/CTO Richard Hoehn. 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 background? Richard Hoehn: I grew up in Switzerland. I did an apprenticeship as

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I know you are above $5 million in revenue. Do you want to provide any metric beyond that? Any more granularity? Richard Hoehn: We’re quite a bit more than $5 million. We did $33.6 million last year. We’re number two, fastest growing company in the United States on Inc 5000. Sramana Mitra: Fantastic.

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Richard Hoehn: Now we got some money and start ramping into sales. You also got the whole complexity of managing this money. What we do is, we aggregate and pay the carriers. If we have a client and we save them money on a specific carrier like FedEx, FedEx sends

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you burning during this period? Richard Hoehn: We were running $45,000 a month for a while. You definitely need some runway.  Sramana Mitra: Where does this money come from?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you have to plug into to make this happen? Based on what you’re describing, integration was involved. Can you talk a bit about what it entailed to get this client to a point where you could start charging them on a gain-share basis? Richard Hoehn: A good amount of client integration

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the details. How did you launch the company? Richard Hoehn: We bootstrapped the company. Freightwise has almost no debt. The way we did it is, we loaded cash in and bootstrapped it. We made one key decision early on that we would build our platform rather than buy it.

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 1)

Freightwise is No. 2 on the Inc. 5000 for 2018. Amazing bootstrapping story. 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 background? Richard Hoehn: I grew up in Switzerland. I did an apprenticeship as a machinist – the

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