Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about how you built the pieces of the business. Let’s talk about the retail e-commerce piece. It sounds like there is inventory involved. Did you finance the inventory through some bank, or did you just do it organically?

Sina Khanifar: That’s where seed capital came in. We didn’t need any financing.

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was Waveform going to do in 2006?

Sina Khanifar: We graduated college and were trying to figure out which up and coming industry we could get started in.

My dad had just come back from South Korea. He mentioned that in South Korea, all the buildings had device repeaters that would help bring the signal from outdoors into the building. We had a bad signal at my parent’s house. It was a solution to a problem that we had.

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 1)

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

Sina started tinkering with bootstrapped entrepreneurship way back in college. It has paid off.

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?

Best of Bootstrapping: ButcherBox CEO Bootstraps a Perishable Meat Business to Significant Scale

ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero shares a fascinating story of a subscription service for high-quality meat being delivered to consumer homes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Mike Salguero: I was born in Paraguay. I’m the youngest of four kids. My parents divorced when I was six months old, and my mom moved up to western Massachusetts with her four children.

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Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the logistics backend at this point? 

Mike Salguero: Multiple warehouses. We have four, soon-to-be six, warehouses. We had multiple cutters and farms. 

Sramana Mitra: Is this national?

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the logistics of packaging this? What format are you shipping this in?

Mike Salguero: It’s basically pre-portioned. If you get a 10-ounce Ribeye, you’re going to get it in a frozen package. Right before Kickstarter, we realized that people didn’t just want beef. They wanted chicken and pork as well. We started offering all three.

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s so disheartening to see all these great businesses go through a Death by Overfunding. I’ve written extensively about this. 

Mike Salguero: What’s funny is with this business, we haven’t raised any money. We are way bigger and way more successful. So much of the success and where we are right now is because we didn’t raise money.

Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are in Chicago and Warsaw?

Stefan Batory: Today we have offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa, and San Antonio in the US. We have offices in Warsaw and a few other cities across the country. We are also in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and in Madrid. These are the markets that we actively go after and operate in.

Sramana Mitra: How many people?