Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million

We recently put the spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Arizona. Here, Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel shares another terrific story of bootstrapping success from Arizona.

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

Joshua Strebel: I was born in a little town in Idaho called Soda Springs. I’m the youngest of nine children. I grew up primarily in Las Vegas, Nevada and was splitting time within Salt Lake City, Utah. My parents were divorced when I was younger, so I went back and forth between households. I finished high school in Salt Lake City and ended up in Arizona where I went to college at Northern Arizona University.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Cinedigm Acquires Bootstrapped 1Mby1M Company Future Today for $60 Million

Exciting news: Future Today, a One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) incubated company, has been acquired by entertainment distributor and digital-network operator Cinedigm for $60 Million.

Buy Side

The acquisition is seen as evidence of Cinedigm “making a big new leap into online video” according to Variety, with Future Today being an ad-supported VOD network that operates over 700 free, over-the-top channels.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to Unicorns

While it doesn’t happen that often, Bootstrapped Unicorns do exist.

My 2014 Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns has a whole section on this topic. You can read an excerpt on my blog titled Bootstrapped Unicorns. In this piece, I discuss three companies, Zoho, eClinicalWorks, and Veeam, that have bootstrapped to about a billion dollars in revenues.

Revenues NOT valuation.

That puts their valuations in the five to ten billion range or beyond. So they are Unicorns (billion dollar valuation) many times over.

You can also read an interview with Sridhar Vembu of Zoho here that describes the early journey of the company: Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

I interviewed him again some years later on Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho.

You can read an interview with Girish Navani of eClinicalWorks on his early journey here: Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani

I also interviewed him again some years later on Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks

Girish was also at one of our roundtables where he described his journey. You can listen to the recording here:

You can read about Ratmir Timashev’s journey here: Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev. Veeam DID become a Unicorn and has raised Private Equity funding.

Ratmir was also at one of our roundtables where he describing his journey. You can listen to the recording here:

Related Case Studies:

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com

Best of Bootstrapping: Alteryx Bootstrapped with Services to a Public Unicorn

AI Unicorn ZipRecruiter First Bootstrapped, then Raised Money

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Celonis Bootstrapped First, Raised Money Later

Bootstrapped Unicorn: Qualtrics Founders Walk Away with $7 Billion

Billion Dollar Unicorns: CarGurus Bootstraps its Way to an IPO

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Adyen Bootstraps to Multi-Billion Valuations

Billion Dollar Unicorns: eClinicalWorks Bootstraps With A Paycheck

Best of Bootstrapping: Blitzscaling vs. Bootstrapping

You must have read something or the other about Blitzscaling, the hypergrowth phenomenon that Reid Hoffman has been championing:

What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants?

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Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Talk to me a bit about doing this in Tucson, Arizona. What are the dynamics? What is the community like and to what extent are you leveraging that community’s pros and cons?

Joshua Strebel: In the early days, we were based in Phoenix first. We moved to Tucson about four years ago. Arizona, as a whole, has a burgeoning and a very vibrant technology entrepreneurship community. They’re not Austin, Silicon Valley, or Seattle. I think it works in our favor though.

I like to use this analogy. The desert is harsh and hot. Resources are scarce. Cacti learned to soak in the water when it comes, then hold onto it to get through the whole year. I think that’s a lot like how companies are built in Arizona. They’re sustainable, smaller, and wiser. They really focus on making the most of the resources they have. >>>

Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 4)

Joshua Strebel: We really enjoy those complex, harder, and out-of-the-normal WordPress workflow cases. There’s also this site called bringatrailer.com. These are a couple of entrepreneurs that probably invite you for one of these interviews. They started with a little online auto auction site and now they’ve gone on to become one of the premier private auction online destinations. They came to us with the requirement of one server and they’re now on 14 or 15 servers. We have them load out across all this hardware to sustain their huge and ever growing traffic footprint.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What percentage of your business is product versus service? You said you do a lot of custom work.

Joshua Strebel: When I say custom work, it’s mostly just in the architecture design going into the product.

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Best of Bootstrapping: The Buy Side of Bootstrapping to an Exit

I am sure you are following the Bootstrapping to Exit (let’s call it B2E) articles. Last time, I showed you some case studies of larger companies who are acquiring bootstrapped startups.

In this post, I will double-click down on the buy-side psychology of the B2E phenomenon.

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Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the point where you hit the $1 million annual revenue run rate mark?

Joshua Strebel: I think that was about 2011 to 2012. So, it took about two and a half to three years to get to a million a year.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very good. With a bootstrapped company, that’s very good. What were some of the strategic moves there after that made a big difference in your trajectory? >>>