Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your involvement in that company and how long you were involved in that company.

Jeremy Young: I was involved for probably a couple of years. I ended up selling my interest back to them.

Sramana Mitra: In what capacity?

Jeremy Young: I came to them with the idea. They did the programming. I did the marketing. We had terms of service not to allow certain types of websites. Everyday, I’d go in there and find certain websites that were breaking the rules. It was just the three of us. We had our hands in everything at that time.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us up to what? 2001 to 2011 timeframe? >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of that partnership?

Jeremy Young: Windows95.com was owned by Steve Jenkins. He was my partner in Virtual Servers. He pushed traffic from Windows95 to my company. He basically had advertisements for the web hosting product on his website.

Sramana Mitra: How big did the company grow to be?

Jeremy Young: We were at about $11 million in sales at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all organic?

Jeremy Young: All organic. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 2)

Jeremy Young: I was teaching HTML at the university at that time. There was a guy in my class, Steve Jenkins, who registered the domain name windows95.com before Microsoft was even thinking about the Internet. If you remember, Windows didn’t even have the web browser in their launch edition of Windows 95. He was building a website that was getting to be pretty popular. It was all free shareware and downloads. It was one of the pretty popular sites on the Internet.

He was in my HTML class just to get half a credit to get his MBA. We became really good friends. My idea was, “Why don’t I start a web hosting company?” I can talk to the current people that I buy web hosting from, get them to create a white-labelled reseller solution for me where customers would have no idea that they were actually purchasing from a different company. Then Steve could provide the marketing to push traffic from his windows95.com website over to my company. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 1)

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

This is a wonderful story of a serial bootstrapper who has built a wonderful e-commerce business similar to Groupon, but with no outside money.

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

Jeremy Young: I was born in Spokane, Washington. My dad had ended up moving our family across the border to Idaho, which is about 45 minutes away. That’s where I grew up. I have six brothers and sisters—two older brothers and four younger sisters. I was raised in a middle lower class home. My dad worked the same job for 30 years. My oldest brother, Jeff, who is five years older than me ended up getting several jobs while he was in high school and got me interested in business and work in general. He’s a role model to me. He worked very hard and always had lots of money. He was able to buy cars, stereo equipments, and video games. I learned from him and really wanted to earn money as well. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2015, where did you finish in terms of revenue level and in terms of other business metrics?

Dara Greaney: Last year, we did $54 million. That was 15% growth. We’ve been profitable every year. We shipped a record 220,000 shipments last year. I think we sold about 22,000 different SKUs last year. One thing to note was that in 2013, we did a private equity transaction. We did do an exit to private equity.

Sramana Mitra: You sold the whole company to private equity?

Dara Greaney: The majority of the company got sold to private equity. We kept some stakes in the business. I had a small piece that I rolled over with the new team. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have for executing this $18 million business in 2010?

Dara Greaney: I have to go back and pull the numbers, but it wasn’t a big staff. We were keeping it pretty lean. We probably had about 30 people and about 5 or 10 on the phone doing order processing.

Sramana Mitra: You continued to keep your website development in India?

Dara Greaney: Website development stayed in India and we just kept adding new features and functionalities. Automotive parts are very difficult to catalog because you have to have the year, make, and models attributes. That was a crazy period. We had never sourced products from overseas, so we went to China and did this relationship-building. As we got bigger, we had the premium brand name. That was all new for us. None of that had been thought of beforehand. We were really opportunistic. We just looked for opportunities and just jumped on them. The research was on the back of a napkin. It really worked well for us in that period. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Using Services from The Netherlands: Pierre and Fred Guelen, Planon Software (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now what? You’re in 2016. How big is the company revenue-wise and what do yo want to do with it? Do you want to go public? Do you want to go public in the US market?

Fred Guelen: We definitely first want to secure further growth for the next three to five years. We see great opportunity worldwide, especially in the American market. We believe that we can achieve a dominant leading position in the US market.

The Asian market is growing really fast right now. There are still huge markets out there to conquer and to enter. For example, Korea, China, and Japan. We are still enthusiastic and we love what we are doing. It would be a great outcome to have an IPO five years from now after becoming the clear world leader in this area. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Business to Exit: Dara Greaney, CEO of BuyAutoParts.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the average deal size? These are pretty high-ticket items, yes?

Dara Greaney: Yes, they’re pretty high-ticket items. We are looking at the $350 to $450 range, which was good because it was so cumbersome for us to get them out the door. Every order has five touch points, but we didn’t have the system in place back then.

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you start bringing in these systems and how did that proceed?

Dara Greaney: We had this in-house system that we kept building on and evolving on. Piece by piece, we would develop. We were using an offshore Indian team to develop the website for us. We had an internal person who was building some of these internal systems. They were constantly working to help evolve our catalog and just every month, do something to make things a little bit easier. >>>