Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The thing that I keep saying in our business is that hyper growth is not a natural state. Steady growth is much more achievable than hyper growth. If you set yourself up for a situation with venture capital financing, where you have to, your definition of success is hyper growth.

You’re setting yourself up for a much lower probability of success than what a bootstrapped situation would put you in. With bootstrapping, you have more options. You can grow at your own pace. You can figure things out. You can experiment.
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Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2015?

David Kashak: In 2014, I started to look for more interns. I was able to get a few more interns. I really liked one of them, who became my first full-time employee. The product that we were building was a native advertising product. We built that with publishers in mind. The idea was if we can provide a good and easy tool for publishers to create, manage, and optimize this native inventory, we get a good publisher base. The demand will come.

That is our focus until today. Our main focus was to go and offer this to more and more publishers. At the same time, we started to expand and get more >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize what I heard and you tell me if I got this right in terms of the key strategies that worked for you. You went after smaller publishers and accumulated a good amount of mobile inventory that was a collection of small sites. You went after advertisers who wanted to run direct response campaigns on these small advertisers’ sites. That’s how you put this ad network together and both sides of the marketplace came together.

David Kashak: Exactly. I basically started with the people who didn’t have anything to lose. If you go to CNN, they can’t give you any inventory. I believe that this is something that’s going to be engaging because it’s a type of advertising that’s non-intrusive. It looks like an article. It’s informative and provides value to the user. From the advertiser’s side, I couldn’t got to Bank of America because they’d be like, “Who are you?”. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What form factor would that be in? If you could provide something, you must have had a hypothesis of what that must look like?

David Kashak: Basically, I thought about developing a platform for them. Using that platform, they can easily create native units for their mobile sites. It’s going to be something that’s going to be engaging and non-intrusive for the user. It will also help the publishers make money.

Sramana Mitra: You left Conduit with this idea. How did you get this business off the ground? Did you bootstrap? Did you raise money? >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 1)

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

Extraordinarily tight, disciplined strategy and execution has enabled David to build a tremendously fast growth company with a small team. A lot to learn!

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 Kashak: I was born in Israel. I grew up in Israel and studied engineering at Tel Aviv University. After studying, I started as a programmer in a cyber security company in Israel. At one point, they offered to relocate me to New York. That offer was very interesting because I wanted to get more exposure to business. I moved to New York. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inflection: Dan Stewart, CEO of Happy Grasshopper (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the inflection point? I remember there was a channel-based inflection point that you were able to hit upon as well, right?

Dan Stewart: It was the introduction of the custom-writing services that caused the spike in our revenues. Instead of providing a single message that they can send once per month, by providing this custom content, we became attractive to a much broader audience.

Sramana Mitra: When was that?

Dan Stewart: That was 2013. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: James Kane, CEO of RWS (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2011, you had scaled significantly. Where are the revenues at this point?

James Kane: I want to say they’re right around $4.5 million or so. My recollection gets a little bit fuzzy there.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next strategic moves? What was the thinking behind those moves?

James Kane: We entered a period of time where growth slowed. We attributed it to the charging of the setup fees. In 2011 and 2012, we suffered a little bit in terms of growth. We didn’t lose ground. We just weren’t growing as explosively as we wanted to. Then in early 2013, we changed our model to one where we didn’t charge large upfront setup fees. That wound up reigniting sales growth again. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inflection: Dan Stewart, CEO of Happy Grasshopper (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit about the ramp in customers. What was the first year and how did it grow from there?

Dan Stewart: In the first year, we ended up with tens of clients from the real estate coach who was talking about our service. Somehow, a very prominent real estate agent up in Washington named Ben Kinney heard about us, and he subscribed to our service. I had no knowledge about him but he enjoyed the result of our service. One day on a webinar, he mentioned that he really liked us and he told his audience that they should take a look at us. We thought we were being hacked because our web traffic just spiked. It was completely unexpected.

From that, we ended up with hundreds of clients. We got to know Ben. He is one of the most successful real estate agents in the world. He has multiple millions >>>