Best of Bootstrapping: Lean Company Bootstraps to $7M

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

Constellix CEO Steven Job has built a lean company with 37 people and has scaled it to $7 million. Read on to learn how.

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?

Steven Job: I was born in Buffalo, New York in 1976. I stayed there during my undergraduate studies. I studied computer science. Throughout that time, my parents always had a business. When you become an entrepreneur, you have to figure out the reasons to become one. Most people do it because their parents had a business or there was something in their life that motivated them. 

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Best of Bootstrapping: Discussing the Evolution of the Indian Startup Industry with Sasha Mirchandani, Kae Capital

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

Sasha Mirchandani is Founder and Managing Director of Kae Capital, an early stage fund focused on India. I’ve known Sasha for over a decade, and we discuss the evolution of the Indian startup industry at length. You can listen to the podcast interview here and the roundtable recording here:

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Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you own an e-commerce or a large-sized business, an outage is challenging. 

Steven Job: Yes, it’s a huge problem. For instance, Amazon was down on October 22. Their DNS provider had a full day outage, so no one was able to buy any products from Amazon that day. This was a big loss. This happened because they had a single DNS provider. They had a single solution and they had no redundancy.

Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the next step in turning this into a real business? 

Steven Job: Are you asking me how I took it from there to a million? My way of doing it probably wasn’t the smartest way. My way was to rinse, wash, and repeat. It was doing it over and over again and doing it better.

Best of Bootstrapping: From Friends and Family Funding to $30M Exit

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

It is important not to lose sight of the capital-efficient, bootstrapped or minimally capitalized companies that have achieved success, provided significant return on investment to their stakeholders, and built value for their customers. VerticalResponse Founder Janine Popick shares her wonderful story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?

Janine Popick: I grew up in a small town called Wingdale, New York. It’s about an hour and 40 minutes north of Manhattan. It’s pretty rural. My dad was an engineer for IBM for 35 years. My mom was a nurse. I went to public school and had a great education, but I really felt the need to get closer to Manhattan. I went to Hofstra University, which is about half hour away from Manhattan. I studied Communications and frankly, wanted to be in television behind the scene either writing, producing, or directing. My first job out of college was with WCBS TV and I was in sales and a little bit of marketing. I realized that that was not what I really wanted to do. I quickly left and took a job as a salesperson selling newspaper space in Brooklyn for a local community newspaper. I decided that after I was in sales, I was going into direct marketing. I did lots of direct mail for small direct marketing agencies in New York.

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Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 4)

Steven Job: I would answer any questions. When I answered those questions, I had my name and the name DNS Made Easy on the footer. I would also recommend my services there. It was hours and hours of answering questions and putting my name out there.

I remember when someone said, “What are DNS providers? I’m having problems. Who would you recommend?” I was so excited. I said, “Hey you know what, I launched this new service. Give it a try.”

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about Guwahati. What was it like building this company in Guwahati? You must have a very loyal employee base, right?

Anjan Pathak: Yes, that is the best part. Employee loyalty is high. The attrition rate is low. In the last six months, only one or two people have left, but they left for higher studies. Earlier, we used to lose people because we could not pay well. We are technologically advanced, we use some of the best technologies.

Bootstrapping from Guwahati: Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do the US companies find you or how do you find them?

Anjan Pathak: Three years ago, we started content marketing. We were not sure how to market. We had questions in our minds, “From Guwahati, how do we reach out to the world?”

What we found was that there is this thing called content marketing or blogging. We started hiring good writers. We have good writers and designers in this part of the world. Initially, it was just content. We started about three years back. We are quite good at SEO.