Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the financial framework of this government relationship?

Robert Hoehn: Actially, we did most of it for free.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting by? How did you sustain the company?

Robert Hoehn: We put a small cash infusion in to start off. We quickly pivoted to try to sell to enterprise customers as well. It’s funny. There’s always training budget in government, right? We actually did a lot of training on how to run social media campaigns, how to do crowdsourcing, how to moderate the crowd. That was one of the ways we got by for the first six months. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make the next major strategic move and at what scale were you at that point?

Robert Hoehn: Around late 2008, we were getting a lot of requests for the idea of having a comment in a survey that could be displayed to other survey respondents and they  could vote on those comments. The idea of having a qualitative question turned into quantitative through votes. That was in the early days of Reddit.

People were voting on each other’s comments. We got the idea of taking it to the extreme. We’ll create communities within large enterprise organisations where people can give feedback. We pushed it even further and said, “This needs to be a separate company. Let’s split this off into its own thing and let it run.” >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale are we talking? How many customers were you able to get? What pricing model were you using? What are some of the business metrics at the point at which you quit the job?

Robert Hoehn: I apologize. It’s been a little while, so I don’t quite remember. The basic model was a freemium where people could create their own surveys and then send it out to 50 people or something like that. You could upgrade to a $15 a month package where you could have bigger lists. Then we had an SMB package that, at that time, was pretty cheap at $49. It was all credit card transactions.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did you have? How many paying customers did you have?

Robert Hoehn: I think it was 50 at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: IdeaScale CEO Robert Hoehn (Part 1)

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

Robert Hoehn: I am from Northern New York, almost bordering Canada. I actually did Computer Science in high school. I was a pretty lucky kid to have experience in programming at a pretty young age. I went to the University of Vermont and joined their Computer Engineering program. I studied Computer Science and Business.

After that, I decided to take a little time off and think about where I wanted to live and what kind of environment I wanted to >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The mode in which you’ve done this is actually very interesting. I find it quite fascinating. What else is interesting in the story?

Angie Stocklin: We tested our hand in drop-ship businesses.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very important point.

Angie Stocklin: Even when we were still in our home, we tested drop-ship businesses. We thought it was a great way to grow without adding inventory. We didn’t have anymore room in our house. It was a process that didn’t work for us for a few reasons. The main reason was that we liked to be in control of the whole process. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale did each of these businesses reach? Are we talking million of dollars in revenue?

Angie Stocklin: To be honest, it was hundreds of thousands. A couple of the brands were in the tens of thousands. Anything that was over a million, we kept.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about the divestiture process. When you decided that you don’t want to move forward with that business, what is the process of divesting each of them?

Angie Stocklin: That’s a great question. It changed over the years. The bigger the brands got, the more complicated the process got. When we divested the diapers website, we used an outside party to help us with the transaction. The transaction was fairly straightforward and easy. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about other businesses. How much did you buy the reading glasses for? How did that ramp?

Angie Stocklin: We ended up just buying a domain. It was not a great domain. It was readingglassesshopper.com. It’s a mouthful. I think we purchased it for $2,500. We were able to leverage a lot of the same suppliers to purchase reading glasses. There was a lot of synergy there.

Sramana Mitra: That one makes perfect sense. The diaper one didn’t make perfect sense.

Angie Stocklin: We had some missteps along the way. That’s for sure.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get rid of the diaper one?

Angie Stocklin: We sold it to a lady in Florida who was trying to quit her job and work from home. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Sunglasses is a fairly big category on the Internet. How did you compete with the existing larger players?

Angie Stocklin: We were a discount brand. There were several brands that were similar to ours at that time. We were targeting customers who wanted something that was not branded and between $15 and $20. That shrunk our customer base just a little bit. We paid a lot of attention to what other people are doing in terms of user experience, price points, and shipping prices to make sure that we were competitive. Understanding paid search and getting better SEO were some of the ways that we were able to win.

Sramana Mitra: How did the business ramp? We are talking 2005?

Angie Stocklin: We purchased the site in early 2006. >>>