Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Again (and Again): Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com and RB2B (Part 1)

Adam has bootstrapped his first company to exit, and before the acquisition, incubated his second one within it. He’s repeating the same incubation model by incubating a third company within his second one. Really cool strategy and a great interview.

Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So you exited this company, and you have started another company now, right?

Emad Daghreri: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You and your partner bootstrapped the first company. You did not take any external financing and you were profitable all along. Can you speak on how you feel about bootstrapping to exit versus company that is built in the venture model? How has your thinking been in terms of building a bootstrap company versus a venture funded company? How is that thinking evolving as you go along? Tell me more.

Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So, Emad, I’m going to try to synthesize all the things that you said into something that people can understand better. What I’m hearing is that in 2019 when you started restructuring the company, you created platforms for doing not only competitions and engagement but also event management and grant management.

Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did your journey evolve in that 2012-17 period. How far did you get from a revenue growth point of view?

Emad Daghreri: Until 2017, the demand was high, and we started getting million dollars contracts. I had to open a technology hub in Bangalore and Jordan just to be able to keep up with the demand.

Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you study Adobe’s product strategy, it’s basically a MarTech rollout. You can do the MarTech rollout. Given where we are, if you focus on companies that have more of an AI nuance to really build a cutting edge MarTech AI rollout, I think you have a very interesting opportunity in front of you.

Rajesh Jain: There is one more dimension to this. Compared to AdTech, MarTech has sort of been the poor cousin. About $500 billion is being spent on AdTech for new customer acquisition and existing customer reacquisition. Half of that money is basically being wasted on wrong acquisitions and reacquisition.

Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double click down on your three acquisitions and talk a bit more about how you price these deals? If you’re using stock, then how do you price yourself and calculate how you price the valuations of these acquisitions? Talk about the philosophy and the mechanics of doing these deals as a bootstrapped company.

Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So this is happening 2015 onwards?

Rajesh Jain: So 2015 onwards, we did the international story and the marketing automation stack. I think we made a mistake on the marketing automation side. Now when I look back in hindsight, I think we focused more on the web and missed out on the app revolution.

Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: While you were doing your political experiments, Netcore is still selling the two products – the SMS enterprise product and the email marketing product, right? That’s what Abhijit Saxena is executing on, right?

Rajesh Jain: From 2007-11, Abhijit was the CEO. In 2011, Girish Nair, who had come back from the US in 2005 and joined us as CEO. He then took over as the CEO from 2011 to 2014. All this time, the good thing was that email marketing in India was starting to grow rapidly. SMS was started. We were pretty much the only Indian company doing email. There were a couple of other smaller ones.