Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 1)

SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman shared his wonderful bootstrapping story with me in 2017.

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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a Finance and Marketing concentration. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors?

JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our marketing. We have to be very ruthless with measuring our return on ad spend.

If it’s not profitable, it just doesn’t work. We have to constantly move and reevaluate where we’re spending our money. We started opening stores and we have to be more scrappy where we measure all these things carefully. Our goal is to make sure >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory?

JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends, social media, and doing some Google AdWords.

Customer service was critical to the whole experience. We did very well on that. We would follow up with every single customer and get feedback as to what they didn’t like. We used that to iterate on the product. That drove down our return rate and drove up >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)

JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm, medium firm, medium soft. We wanted to just make one. Is it possible that most people actually need the same stuff?

We take that formula and offer that at a fair price, which was easy to do by going direct. We don’t have to have as big a margin because we’re not selling it to a store that marks it up again. We can operate at a much better price. We’re simplifying the process. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)

Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital.

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?

JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix, but I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to Penn State. That’s where I met my co-founder, Daehee Park. From there, my career took me to Silicon Valley working for several startups. That’s where my co-founder and I stuck together. We were >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much of your leads come from open source customers who have bought your core platform and then you get in and sell them applications?

Patrick Sullivan: A lot of our leads come from word of mouth. It woulld usually be an engineer who works at one company and then transfers to another company. Early on, we had a hard time because when customers heard open source, they’d assume it’s inferior. It’s interesting how over the last couple of years, that mindset has drastically changed. Open source means they can build anything they want on top of it. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: They take over the product roadmap and they don’t pay enough. You lose control of the process and become their outsourced development shop.

Patrick Sullivan: That’s exactly what happens. When you’re stuck in the middle of it, you still get swayed by the brand recognition. That was the hard part. I remember five stories of these big companies trying to push our roadmap in a different direction. We finally had to pull back. That is between 2012 to about 2015.

Around 2016 is when we finally got the platform to a place where it can scale worldwide and it can be distributed in multiple data >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 5)

Patrick Sullivan: It turns out our billing system was turned off. We couldn’t have figured that out because it was so complex at that time. It was one of those things where it was just an eye-opener. You were working on so many different projects at the same time that you always have to fundamentally make sure that the key pieces are there, no matter what. Now we have these test suites that we’ve made.

It’s funny because when I tell the story, people are like, “How are you still in business? You guys seem to make every mistake possible.” A lot of entrepreneurs never started companies before. >>>