Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We are a completely remote company and we’ve been completely remote since 2010. When you started in 2016 as part of Virgin’s startup program, what were you going to do? Lily Stoyanov: In 2016, we already had a product. We already had customers. 

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 2)

Lily Stoyanov: At that time, I already had an idea about Transformify. It started when I was still at Coca-Cola. When you lead a business transformation project, you know that processes need to be optimized and costs need to be cut. Inevitably, people lose their jobs. Many companies were going through business transformation. The moment

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Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Lily has built a virtual company with zero employees, all freelancers and scaled it without outside financing. Read on for more. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Let’s start at the very beginning

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Best of Bootstrapping: How FormAssembly CEO Bootstrapped a Virtual Company with a Paycheck

Cedric’s story is a textbook case study of the kind of entrepreneur we want to see emerge and grow in every corner of the world: a solo entrepreneur who is a developer and a product guy capable of getting to validation while holding onto a day job. Today, FormAssembly CEO Cedric Savarese has almost 50

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Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How were you addressing the blacklist issue? How were you detecting if something wasn’t blacklisted but was a problem? How were you figuring that out? Rob Cheng: What we’re doing is the opposite. We’re creating a white list of everything that’s good. We’re looking for every single good program that we can find

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Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Were you hiring these developers in South Carolina? Rob Cheng: We used Monster.com. Back then, that was a way to hire people. So I would just look for the best people and for the skill. I would find them wherever I could. As it ends up, a couple of our developers ended up

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Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, just give some metrics of how it took off. What kind of numbers were you doing? How long did it take you to get to a million in revenue for example? Rob Cheng: In the very beginning, we had no revenue model. Revenue was not important at that point in time. It’s

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Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It was a software-driven diagnostic tool. You were running a piece of software from the internet onto that machine. Rob Cheng: Yes. It was using a technology by Microsoft called ActiveX. It was quite similar to cloud computing. We stored all the results there. We were able to track which type of computers

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