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Best of Bootstrapping: Serial Entrepreneur Bootstraps First

Posted on Thursday, May 25th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Joe Speiser, Founder and CEO of LittleThings bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping LittleThings First, Raising Money Later

Posted on Friday, Sep 17th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Joe Speiser, Founder & CEO of LittleThings bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital.

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)

Posted on Sunday, May 24th

Joe Speiser: We spend a lot of time looking at, “How can we engage the user? What kind of content can we show them to keep them interested?” What does that [time spent] look like? Is it one minute, two minutes, or three minutes? What’s that number? Right now, we’re up to 3 minutes and

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)

Posted on Saturday, May 23rd

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of the content? What is the editorial strategy of Little Things? Joe Speiser: The whole goal for Little Things – and what we’ve stuck with since the beginning – has been uplifting content – the opposite of what the nightly news represents. Our goal was to stop this constant

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, May 22nd

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying? Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, May 20th

Joe Speiser: In 2005, we were a very profitable business and were scaling quickly. We had 50 to 60 employees at that time. This was my first large business, so I felt that we needed help. We needed some outside experience to guide us on how to scale this company. We brought on private equity. We

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th

Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2000? Joe Speiser: We started the deal sites in early 1999. Sramana Mitra: This was bootstrapped at that point? Joe Speiser: Yes, there were no VCs. These businesses were profitable in the first few months. If we weren’t able to make money in the first few months, we’d move

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, May 18th

Joe bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business is a spin-off within the second business that takes him back to

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