Can You Enhance Your Negotiating Power in Fundraising?

Can you enhance your negotiating power in fundraising?

Most certainly you can.

Watch this inspiring 1 minute 14 seconds video and learn how:

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Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace to $10M: Sal Akbani, CEO of Gateway Classic Cars (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where to from here? More of the same?

Sal Akbani: More of the same. We’re also incorporating a few other items out there into the product mix. As part of one of our themes, we have partnered with a very famous NASCAR personality Kenny Wallace. We are producing a mini-series on TV and negotiating with Fox Business News to do a half season series where we advise viewers on how to make classic and exotic cars part of their investment portfolio. There’s an investment component to some of these products, which have been inspired from the products on www.justcarchecks.co.uk

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. >>>

Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace to $10M: Sal Akbani, CEO of Gateway Classic Cars (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Would you say, looking back, that was not the right market to go into?

Sal Akbani: It was actually a good market. We just didn’t know what the heck we were doing.

Sramana Mitra: What do you think, looking back, did you not do or were not doing right?

Sal Akbani: Managing. We were poor managers.

Sramana Mitra: Poor people managers or poor marketing managers? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bonanza Co-Founder Mark Dorsey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you mitigate the constrained budget?

Mark Dorsey: I’m really proud of this. It’s something that we take a lot of pride in. We identified that we had a very rabid seller fanbase who were willing to do whatever it took to make our company the most successful marketplace online. Realizing that, we created a guerrilla marketing group. We called this group the Bonanza Action Club. We invited the top 50 members of our site. >>>

Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace to $10M: Sal Akbani, CEO of Gateway Classic Cars (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your site operates as a two-sided marketplace except you store the inventory.

Sal Akbani: Yes, and we have currently 14 plus 1.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Sal Akbani: We have 14 active ones [warehouses] and we have one more coming up in Denver on June. We’re currently also working in Scottsdale to open our 16th [warehouse]. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bonanza Co-Founder Mark Dorsey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did Bill start coding the product?

Mark Dorsey: That was in 2007. He started building Bonanza from the ground up. At that time, there were a lot of eBay alternatives. The opportunities were obvious. There were a lot of programs that allowed you to create an e-commerce marketplace by just filling out a form. These were website templates. He decided early on that he was going to build it from scratch.

Sramana Mitra: Was Etsy on your radar at that time? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bonanza Co-Founder Mark Dorsey (Part 1)

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

Bonanza has scaled to over $75 million in revenue with just $1 million in funding. It was bootstrapped for several years before a penny of external financing was raised. Amazingly crisp execution. A must-read story of how a two-sided marketplace was masterfully seeded and scaled.

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

Mark Dorsey: I am from Los Angeles, California. That’s where I was born. I was raised in Southern California. In hindsight, there >>>

Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace to $10M: Sal Akbani, CEO of Gateway Classic Cars (Part 1)

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

Sal has bootstrapped Gateway Classic Cars to over $10 million in revenue. Another great story of how a two-sided marketplace was masterfully seeded and scaled in a niche market.

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?

Sal Akbani: We have the same ancestry. My parents were from India. I was born in Pakistan. My mother is from Calcutta. My dad is from Bombay. >>>