Bootstrapping Using Services: James Kane, CEO of RWS (Part 1)

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

We’re big believers in Bootstrapping Using Services, as you know. Here’s yet another story of an entrepreneur who has scaled to over $10 million in revenue using the method.

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?

James Kane: I grew up in a very small town in far northern New York. It’s a college town of about 2,000 people. My father was a university professor. He taught Mechanical Engineering at Clarkson University. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inflection: Dan Stewart, CEO of Happy Grasshopper (Part 1)

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

Dan Stewart is a 1M1M entrepreneur. Read how he has navigated his way to an inflection point that has brought him to the cusp of 4x growth 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?

Dan Stewart: My family moved around quite a lot as I was growing up. I rarely stayed in a school for more than a year. That took me from West Virginia and Chicago, down to Florida. >>>

How can a Bootstrapped Startup Compete with Heavily Funded Ones?

From $100k to $1M: Creative Bootstrapping

From $100k to $1M: Bootstrapping Using a Paycheck

From $100k to $1M: Bootstrapping Using Services

Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 2)

Al Lalani: I had hired a few developers in my first startup. I didn’t know what to do when I was losing money every month. I wasn’t making much on the e-commerce side. A friend of mine said, “I’m in a little bit of a fix. We need to build this site. I have a budget of $100,000, but I need to build it in the next two and a half months.” I said, “I can do that.”

From there, we built a very profitable web development agency. That was the first project that we got. This failure turned into a services business for a little bit. That was good for me personally because it was good money. It wasn’t very gratifying because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had always been a product-focused person. I wanted to build something. >>>

Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 1)

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

We often get this question: how do you compete with a bootstrapped startup against heavily venture-funded competitors. We’ve done other stories on this topic. Here’s one that will give you additional perspective.

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?

Al Lalani: I was born in India. I moved here about 15 years ago. I was 21 when I first moved to the United States. I have an engineering background. I was hired by a company based in Los Angeles. This was around the 1999 timeframe around a year before the dot-com bust. The company had raised around $1 million. At >>>