Best of Bootstrapping: How SmartBuyGlasses CEO David Menning Bootstrapped to $50 Million

David has bootstrapped a global e-commerce venture from Hong Kong. Splendid execution!

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?

David Menning: I grew up in Sydney. I’ve been educated in Australia. In my later years, I studied at universities overseas both in Canada and Japan for a little while. It was this time when I was abroad spending time in different countries that I was exposed to different business models, cultures, and people.

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What country did you first go into outside Denmark?

Sebastian Petersen: Norway and Sweden. Then we started going south into Germany and France.

Sramana Mitra: Was there something different that Norway and Sweden wanted?

Sebastian Petersen: Only simple things. Once we started moving out of Scandinavia to Germany and France and especially Eastern Europe, we really had to start tweaking our websites to the local community.

Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you tell me how many years are we talking in this mode? When did you move out of your mom’s house to your own apartment?

Sebastian Petersen: We only did that for about six months.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you doing, revenue-wise, when you moved to the apartment?

Sebastian Petersen: I guess $10,000 a year.

Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 1)

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

What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All 60 employees work out of Horsens currently.

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?

Sebastian Petersen: I’m from Denmark. I would say I had a pretty ordinary background. Both my parents were working in the public sector. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit together with one of my best buddies growing up. We were always together.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who is the biggest of your partners?

Josh Kamrath: D2L and Cengage are tied right now.

Sramana Mitra: They have course material and you complement that with the video assessment. 

Josh Kamrath: There are two different partners. There is a content partner and what you just described is exactly what it is. They have existing content. Together with Cengage, for instance, we create preloaded assessment and that’s married to the content that’s already existing. It’s a just-in-time type of delivery.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you sell? Selling faculty-by-faculty and direct door-to-door is not a viable scalable model. How did you actually get to market?

Josh Kamrath: To answer your question directly, we were selling direct door-to-door. Then we evolved into selling more enterprise-oriented deals. Instead of going to individual faculty, we would go to directors of technology.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How far did you get? In terms of metrics, how long did it take you to reach your first million in revenue?

Josh Kamrath: It took a solid three years to get to the first million. As we were getting to around a million, we expanded our focus in terms of the business model. So that’s an important thing to mention.

Sramana Mitra: What year is this?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re avid users of Upwork. We really believe in that whole virtual staffing model.

Josh Kamrath: For a big and long part of our history, we used Upwork to get the first iteration of our products to market. We found some developers in Ukraine. We did a bake-off. I had three different teams do the same project and picked the best team to become our core developers and those guys took us very far away with our products.