Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Using Services and Scaling Using Content Marketing

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

You have heard me discuss bootstrapping using services quite a lot. With Kinetic Data CEO John Sundberg’s story, we also take on another important key strategy for customer acquisition: content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised and in what kind of circumstances?

John Sundberg: I’m currently in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where our office is. I was born in Minneapolis. I’ve been in Minnesota all of my life. My wife is from Connecticut. My upbringing was very open-minded. My dad taught positive attitude and sales training and indirectly, I’ve had that positive attitude all my life. He ran his own company. It was a small company. As a result of watching that while growing up, I thought I wanted to work in a big company.

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535th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With San Banerjee, ADDA

San Banerjee, Co-founder of ADDA, talks about her entrepreneurial journey as a bootstrapped entrepreneur tackling heavily funded competitors.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to a High Growth Inc. 500 Company

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

CEO Chris Farrell and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position. After we spoke in 2014, Tallie became a part of Emburse in 2017.

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

Chris Farrell: I was born in San Francisco. I was basically born and raised in the Bay Area, mostly down on the peninsula. I got my start in my career with Arthur Andersen as an accountant. Then I worked my way up through the accounting ranks and eventually was a Controller of a public company and a CFO of a public company. Along the way, having been steeped in technology in the Bay Area, I set out on the latest part of my journey, which is running a software company.

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Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next product shift?

Dean Guida: We started investing more in marketing, PR, and sales. We rode a whole bunch of technology waves. We went from the C and C++ market and started competing in the Visual Basic market. We then started shifting to selling Visual Basic developers. That just opened a lot to us. It wasn’t extra R&D work for us. It was a faster language and a faster-growing and popular developer. That helped us as well. 

Sramana Mitra: What time frame is that?

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 6)

Dean Guida: A strategic event along the way was definitely PR. PR was important to get advocacy, authenticity, and having others say that we were legitimate. That was early on. I told you the story about Wendy’s. That was big for us. Second, I was speaking at software development shows. That was another big inflection point of helping us build credibility and create relationships in the industry. That was a big thing that we did that helped us.

The third was just the fact that we were authentic. I loved software development, so anytime that I talked to a development team, they could sense that. They could see that we cared about what we were doing. There was this one deal where I was talking with Dun & Bradstreet. I was showing them our software and they were like, “Wow, you guys built all that software? How many people are on your team? You have 17 people on your team? No way, you didn’t build that software with 17 people. “

Best of Bootstrapping: Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapped a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19M

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

We’ve seen a real trend of zero-logistics e-commerce businesses scaling phenomenally well. Read Wrist-Band.com Founder CEO Azim Makanojiya’s experience up to when we spoke in 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of educational path did you follow?

Azim Makanojiya:I am from India. My parents shifted from a village to Mumbai city for better opportunities. That’s where I was born. My father came to the US around 1984. My mom was still back there in India. Within two years, we came to Houston and settled down here. I was about a year old then.

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Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What does the internet do to your business? Let’s say we are talking about the time period from 1994 to 1996 when the Internet was happening. How does your company change?

Dean Guida: It was way back when it started. So, we had to create a website, which helped us a lot. We got into writing user interface components for Java. Charles Schwab and FedEx built their trading and shipping applications with our development tools and our UI component. I spoke at the second Java 1, which was the best software development show in the world at the time.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Book E-Commerce Business BookPal

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

BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo had identified a gap in the book business and built a thriving company. Let’s learn the how, what, and why of it.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Tony DiCostanzo: I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Shortly after turning two, I moved up to Nome, Alaska – from a small city to an even smaller village of 3,000 people. We lived there through the sixth grade and then moved back to Anchorage through most of high school. I ended up spending a couple of years in Washington State but found that California was more of my natural habitat. I came down to go to school at Pepperdine University and met my wife who was from southern California. It was a natural fit to stay here and be close to her family. That was what drove us to the Orange County area.

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