Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $20M+ and an Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. Imagine Easy Solutions’ Co-founder and Co-CEO Neal Taparia shares his wonderful journey. They scaled the business to over $20 million in revenue without investment and sold to Chegg in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to Over $20M and Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. Imagine Easy Solutions’ Co-founder and Co-CEO Neal Taparia shares his wonderful journey. They scaled the business to over $20 million in revenue without investment and sold to Chegg in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very

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Best of Bootstrapping: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Bootstraps to Exit

We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia’s journey is a wonderful one. 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? Neal Taparia: I was born in the suburbs of Chicago.

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 6)

Neal Taparia: Then we acquired the next biggest site in the space which was called CitationMachine. Later on, we acquired the biggest international site in UK and Australia following that same playbook of building relationships to eventually lead to an acquisition. By 2016, we were reaching 30 million students across the globe, primarily in Western-educated

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the monetization strategy, it sounds like you needed advertisers through the ad networks who were going after the student demographics. Neal Taparia: That’s correct. Sramana Mitra: Were there ad networks specifically focused on that demographic or were you just working with various ad networks and finding the segment match with

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we step through the journey.  Neal Taparia: When we started working on it full-time, I had mentioned that we benefited from a lot of organic growth. What was really interesting is as we focused on it full-time, we were able to understand all these ways to increase ad revenue.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of metrics before we go on to the post-Lehman story. What kind of revenues were you making in college? What kind of revenues were you making from the company while you were working at Lehman? Neal Taparia: In college, we were probably making around $30,000 a year. It was nothing crazy.

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Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If they came to your site, what would they do? Neal Taparia: They would go there when they’re writing papers to start documenting their information. We had launched this site after putting it together over two months. Students would go there. Say they were using Catcher in the Rye, all they would have

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