A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You knew that you needed to move out. You didn’t know where to move out to.

Aviram Jenik: Exactly. It’s not that we had a brilliant idea at that time. We just thought, “Education is nice, but it’s not big enough. This new market that’s coming is huge.” Our engine was like a Java applet. They were little engines that you could give instructions to to do stuff over the Internet.

With the education software, we would use them to tell the engines what to show the students and how the course would look like. That fitted the Internet well. At that time, Internet had a limited bandwidth. There was not a lot of information that you could transfer over a dial-up connection. >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The reason why professors want to see how you are proceeding is because they can’t partially mark you. If you’re going in the right direction and somehow made a mistake and got the wrong answer, they can still give you partial points for how you were moving. That’s, I think, the thinking behind showing the steps.

Aviram Jenik: I totally agree with you. Here’s what we teach students when we do that. Number one, the professor has a problem. The students have to change their way of doing stuff. The second one, which is more problematic is, if you do your way correctly and reach your own conclusion, it’s not okay. When you do anything practical in life and if you reach the wrong result, >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 6)

Jared Shusterman: Quite frankly, a lot of these guys don’t trust the bigger brands that they sell. The number one game changer here in helping these guys was to be cooperative and, in effect, reap the benefits of that cooperation. It then came down to funding. We put a stake in the ground even in our industry around making sure that we are, by far, the best in helping manage and spend the funding that’s coming from the brand down to the local partner.

It has allowed us to position ourselves particularly for the client profile that I described. I described three things. They sell to an independent sales channel. Two is, they have a comprehensive set of marketing tactics that the channel partner uses. The third is >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 1)

Going against the grain of Venture Capital mania, in 1999, Aviram started his second bootstrapped venture. 18 years later, he is still running it. Happily!

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?

Aviram Jenik: I was born and raised in Israel. I moved to California about 10 years ago. I spent most of my adult life in >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Can you sketch for us a bit of the progression of the business? How many brands did you book as customers in 2006? How many in 2007 and so on?

Jared Shusterman: I don’t know the exact number. Today, we’re a little over 60 brands that are powering over 60,000 or 70,000 channel partners. Early on in 2006, we learned a lot under the new model. In 2009, we decided to launch again. This time, we reused a lot of the data tables and structures.

In 2011, we launched it with all the learnings and made sure that the architecture was modeled correctly. From a client standpoint, >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you get your first manufacturer customer?

Jared Shusterman: We got the first one who really helped us understand the beauty of the model in December.

Sramana Mitra: December of 2006?

Jared Shusterman: No, 2005. That’s how we discovered that this was a much more interesting model than the original model that I started with. At that point, the whole idea changed and I hired our first employee in January. I remember everyone thinking I was crazy, because I had only so much money to spend. He’s still with us today. He’s our CTO. >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone? Put this in chronological order for me. Where are we now?

Jared Shusterman: We are going into December 2005. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a jewelry manufacturer. I talked about what I was doing in terms of building marketing programs. He said, “Interesting. I like what you’re doing. What ends up happening is they’ll buy products from me and if they can’t sell it, they end up returning it. I’m going to give you a list of your customers. Would you help my retailers advertise the products that I’m selling? On top of that, we’ll pay for up to 50% of anything you guys spend.” >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What prompted you to go dig into jewelry? What was the trigger for jewelry?

Jared Shusterman: We had a family friend who who was a consultant for jewelry retailers. I was lucky enough to spend some time with him and actually attended a show with him. I was able to speak to a lot of the retailers at the show as we pitched our concept.

Rather than going back and starting a full-time job, we felt that we had something. This was around the time that Constant Contact was starting to get popular with email marketing. I moved back in with my parents. For the first four to five months, I >>>