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little things
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping LittleThings First, Raising Money Later
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.
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)
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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)
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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)
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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin. Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 3)
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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)
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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)
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
