Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Somebody else is sending these letters from Indiana and you were an affiliate partner of that particular business.

Angie Stocklin: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: You were generating traffic in your website and monetizing those letters in that affiliate model from that original business?

Angie Stocklin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How much did he charge for these letters and how much commission were you getting?

Angie Stocklin: I remember that we got $5 per letter. I don’t remember how much the customer was being charged. I want to say somewhere between $10 and $15. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is actually an interesting point because we often see entrepreneurs trying to start affiliate marketing as a side business. Did you both quit your jobs and start it full-time or did you still hold on to your prior jobs?

Angie Stocklin: We kept our jobs for several years. We were toying around with the idea of running an affiliate business in 2004. We officially launched in 2005. I didn’t leave my job until the middle of 2007. We put our friends, families, and hobbies on the side for several years while we built our business up. We made sure that we were cash flow positive and our business was growing. It was really important for us to be self-funded and to make sure that we can support ourselves as we grow.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it one step at a time. You basically had pay checks coming in. By the way, we have a name for this methodology called Bootstrapping With A Paycheck. If you look in the Entrepreneur Journeys Series, there’s actually a book called Bootstrapping With A Paycheck, which is actually your methodology of starting something and developing it on the side. Let’s double-click into the first few things that you did as you got this started. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 1)

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

Angie and her husband have built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey, and hope you would as well.

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

Angie Stocklin: I was born in a small town called Paisley in Indiana. It’s a town of about 2,500. My mom was a teacher and my dad is a farmer and somewhat of an entrepreneur in the fact that farming is a self-employed type of business. My dad and his brothers owned an implement dealership. They sold tractors. I grew up with a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I went to college at the University of Evansville and started studying Psychology. I went on to get my Masters and my educational specialist degree in School Psychology. I worked as a school psychologist for three years before starting One Click. >>>

How to Compete with a Well-Funded Startup

By pointing to the following fantastic case study, I recently answered this question on Quora: “I have an idea for a startup, but there’s already a well-funded startup with a related idea, what should I do?”

Hotelplanner is a bootstrapped company that is now doing $25M/year and is the market leader in the group travel and hotel booking sector.

When they started, they had numerous heavily funded competitors who were spending money like there was no tomorrow.

But they were not focused on fundamentals.
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Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So you’re trying to find a mid-market niche now where you would be able to compete with these very large players. That security and identity management space for both enterprise and mid-sized enterprises is a very crowded space. I’ll tell you what bothers me about your enterprise strategy.

James Litton: There’s a couple of things to look at there. On first blush, it does look like a crowded space, but the reality is that it’s not as crowded as you think. Whenever you go and start gathering data from Gartners of the world, you end up with these massive numbers of companies that, at first, look like they play in the IAM space.

The reality is many of these players only have very small pinpointed solutions. Take Ping Identity, for example, which is basically a single sign-on solution. You have lots of these players that have one small piece of functionality, but they’re not full-scale identity and access management players. They can’t offer full solutions around identity and access management whether that be for administration purposes or governance purposes. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The growth rate did not shift when you went from services to product?

James Litton: During the transition, on some level, it probably slowed. There were some critical things that we had to go through. As an entrepreneur, it’s scary. You’re going from something that you know into a world that you don’t know. It’s like starting the company all over again. I remember those early days of 2006.

As we started to make our shift, we’re faced with some of the same things again. We didn’t know how to position this. We had to go out and do some experimentation. We had to learn how to position the product. We had to learn the answers to some of the questions that you were asking, “Why would you take a risk on Identity Automation versus these more established products?” I would say during the 2010 to 2011 timeframe, growth slowed, but not dramatically. It might have been 20% growth.

Sramana Mitra: Between 2010 and 2015, what other major strategic moves did you make?
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Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All your existing K-12 services clients came with you to this product?

James Litton: Yes, because we were extremely focused on the customer. That continues to be a central part of the Identity Automation ethos. It’s not just paying lip service to it, but actually living up to that. I think the real testimony to how effective we were is that we had about 80 customers, and 79 of them came over.

Sramana Mitra: You had done all these projects to set up all their identity management. It was done on others people’s products like Novell and Sun. What was in your product that came on to? What was special about your product?

James Litton: There’s a couple of reasons why they came. First and foremost, I would say that relationship management is a huge piece of it. When it came to the technical justification for making a jump from product A to Identity Automation was because we made a good technical case for why that made sense. That was primarily focused on ease of use. The customer didn’t have the capability to self-manage most of these other very large solutions once they were in place. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was K-12 also consulting services and implementing identity management solutions kind of projects?

James Litton: Yes. Keep in mind that as we were doing this, we were doing projects for all types of organizations. It’s just that the majority of them was K-12.

Sramana Mitra: The business, however, were these projects? You were basically consulting services for these projects?

James Litton: Exactly. I think this is really instrumental to the story. Consulting companies are a dime a dozen. Most consulting companies have this basic philosophy of doing whatever it takes to get into the account. Once you get into the account, you then change order the customer to death. We took the approach that we’re not going to operate that way. >>>