Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 1)

Sardor has bootstrapped a marketplace of home appliance technicians to over $10 million in revenue. Great story.

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: Capital Efficient Entrepreneurs Turn $1M into $80M

Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili, has turned $1 million of personal investment, along with his co-founder, into $80 million in revenue. Pretty capital-efficient, this entrepreneur’s journey!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with where your story begins. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeff Wilkins: I grew on the East Coast. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington DC and moved around a lot as a kid. I spend time in Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.

I went to undergraduate school back on the East Coast. I went to Duke and majored in Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. I then went to the West Coast. I was at Stanford and pursued a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA.

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I know you are above $5 million in revenue. Do you want to provide any metric beyond that? Any more granularity?

Richard Hoehn: We’re quite a bit more than $5 million. We did $33.6 million last year. We’re number two, fastest growing company in the United States on Inc 5000.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Did you reach this level of revenue purely on the strength of heavy manufacturing? How did the vertical and geographical strategy change?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Richard Hoehn: Now we got some money and start ramping into sales. You also got the whole complexity of managing this money. What we do is, we aggregate and pay the carriers. If we have a client and we save them money on a specific carrier like FedEx, FedEx sends us a bill.

Best of Bootstrapping: Can You Bootstrap a Virtual Company to Over $5 Million?

Renaissance Periodization CEO Nick Shaw has done just that. He has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on, you’ll learn a lot.

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?

Nick Shaw: I was born and raised in the state of Michigan. I grew up with the goal of wanting to go to the University of Michigan. It’s a top-level school. I was lucky enough to be accepted there. I started in the Sports Management program. I originally wanted to be an athletic director.

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Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you burning during this period?

Richard Hoehn: We were running $45,000 a month for a while. You definitely need some runway. 

Sramana Mitra: Where does this money come from?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you have to plug into to make this happen? Based on what you’re describing, integration was involved. Can you talk a bit about what it entailed to get this client to a point where you could start charging them on a gain-share basis?

Richard Hoehn: A good amount of client integration was involved in terms of how they needed to bring the data back in for their ERP systems. We often try to provide value on multiple levels.

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the details. How did you launch the company?

Richard Hoehn: We bootstrapped the company. Freightwise has almost no debt. The way we did it is, we loaded cash in and bootstrapped it. We made one key decision early on that we would build our platform rather than buy it.