Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the acquisition happen?

James Cramer: We would occasionally get solicitations from bankers. We would always entertain it to get a sense of which company was worth it and what was going on in terms of acquisitions. One day, I got an email from a banker in New York that said, “I have a client that is looking to make an acquisition in the United States for a company that had these criteria.”

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me out with one piece of this story. In an entrepreneur journey, the first time you’re doing it without personal money is a different ball game than when you have made money and are doing it a second time. By the time you come to Zimit, you had money. It’s a different situation. The bootstrapping using services story is important in CPG. How did you get your first customer? What got you your first customer? 

James Cramer: My partner and I were both employees of our previous companies. We met on a project that their company and our company were working on together. We were in our mid-20s. You can convince yourself of a lot of things at that age. We started to convince ourselves that we could make it on our own. We convinced ourselves that we could compete with the companies that we worked for even though they were billion-dollar organizations.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 1)

Among the biases of the Venture Capital industry that need to be categorically ignored, Bootstrapping Using Services happens to be on the top of the list. Read on for yet another fantastic textbook case study.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Roundtable Recap: July 29 – How Itai Sadan Bootstrapped Duda First with a Paycheck and then Raised $100 Million

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Itai Sadan, Co-founder and CEO of Duda. I first met Itai back in 2013 and started getting to know his story. It’s a compelling case study of bootstrapping with a paycheck and then raising significant funding to scale over more than a decade.

Escrow Protocol

As for our entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Dennis Schulte from Toronto, Canada, pitching Escrow Protocol, a 2-sided marketplace for milestone-based funding.

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Best of Bootstrapping: InRule Was Bootstrapped Using Services

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Rik Chomko, now CEO at InRule, and his team had to navigate a long journey, including a recession that disrupted one of their key customer segments dramatically. Read our interview from 2014 to learn how they survived.

Sramana: Rik, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you raised? What kind of circumstances? Give us some of the back story.

Rik Chomko: I was born in the Chicago land suburbs and grew up there. My dad introduced me to computers at a very early age, which was way back in the 70’s, mostly because that’s what he did for a living. He’s one of the first people, I think, that jumped on to the information technology bandwagon. He would bring home phone systems and couplers so that we were able to link into the VAC system or the mainframe system running at his company. I had a twin brother and we used to just get up there and play games. We thought it was the neatest thing in the world, and that kind of got me started. As I grew up, I did other things but computers have always been a core interest and one of those things that I would like to sit down and play with.

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 7)

Ben Hodson: What we realized is that customers coming to us were for customization and choice. Because we’d built the software to be so customizable with all these integrations, we now had a full product solution that we could start scaling. We saw tremendous growth in 2018. We did over 100% in our growth. In 2019, we were just skyrocketing.

In June, we hit a wall and had three months of negative growth. That was scary because it had never happened. We had become profitable back in 2015 and we were running the company at a good clip without outside investment. It was scary to have negative growth numbers. We didn’t know what was going on.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 6)

Ben Hodson: By the end of 2013, we were in a position where these guys would say, “Hey, we would pay for this. This is better than a lot of stuff out in the market.” We decided to take the money that we earned on our latest project RepeatSys. We had about $50,000 each. We were going to put it in JobNimbus to feed it with our own money and then sell off RepeatSys, which we basically sold at cost.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped TEOCO to $175M with Services

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

There is, of course, a myth that you cannot build a large company by bootstrapping. What a total pot of crxp! Meet TEOCO Founder CEO Atul Jain, and get your preconceptions checked and readjusted.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where were you born, raised, and educated? Tell us a bit of the backstory of your current entrepreneurial story.

Atul Jain: I was born in Kanpur, India. I was born in a lower-middle class family. My father was an engineer in PWD. I am the youngest of three children. The eldest is my sister Manu Jain and I have an elder brother Naveen Jain. At the age of eleven, I received a merit scholarship from the Government of India to study in a residential school. After I finished high school in 1976, I studied at the Indian Statistical Institute and graduated with a Bachelors and Masters in Statistics. My goal and dream all along was to be a Professor, so I came to the US to do a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. I did my research in probability theory in the field called Brownian motion. I completed my Ph.D. and got caught up in a game of cards called bridge. Five years later, I realized that my life was going nowhere and my career was going nowhere.

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