Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2005, you said you had the biggest growth year. What kind of numbers did you do?

Samy Liechti: We had 75% growth. The reason was very simple. We had won an award for customer experience in the US. I remember we had a whole bunch of PR coverage all over the place. We did not have enough people, socks, and time. This brought us to the next level. I think 70% growth in one year is a lot. We had to adopt processes, systems, and so on. That was the biggest growth ever. Usually, we have 20% a year. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were all these customers in Switzerland?

Samy Liechti: We have different currencies and languages here. We were not prepared for payments outside Switzerland. We only had Swiss Francs. All of a sudden, we had our first German customers. Then we started the same for Germany. Little by little, we introduced other currencies and then other payment methods like credit cards. I remember, in the early stage, a Japanese customer wanted to order and we weren’t able to process the credit card. One of his cousins was on a holiday in the Swiss Alps. He still had some cash left, so he sent it in an envelope and we sent him the socks to Japan. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to these articles? Were you doing PR outreach to the press?

Samy Liechti: We did a press release. At that time, we did that by fax. Then we put together a list of potential journalists. Then we had a little luck. By the time we launched, the Internet hype had arrived here in Europe. It was always the same examples of eBay, Amazon, and some others. People suddenly started wondering if there’s something going on in our country. There was not much going on, so the socks guys got quite some coverage. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you do it? How did you launch? What did you do specifically?

Samy Liechti: We knew that marketing will be very hard. We knew that a subscription business will only work if people like the quality of goods they receive. We knew that we wanted to build a brand, and we knew that we don’t have time to solve all the problems. We did a couple of things. One thing was we spent a lot of time discussing which problems we wanted to address. We selected only one or two and then we solved them.

Sramana Mitra: Which ones were those? >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 1)

Samy Liechti has built up a very nice subscription e-commerce business from Switzerland selling socks, underwear, and shorts. The company is 100% bootstrapped.

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?

Samy Liechti: I’m Swiss and grew up in Switzerland. I went to one of the finest European business schools. I studied Business and Economics in Switzerland, Paris, and Toronto. After graduating, I worked in marketing and communications before I opened up my own company. >>>

Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the revenue would you say is BPO services?

Atul Jain: We are mostly a software company. When you say professional services, do you mean to say installation and implementation kind of stuff?

Sramana Mitra: No, anything that is custom where you’re not selling software.

Atul Jain: We don’t do any real contract-based software development. Sometimes, we do services that are not selling software. For example, we do have a portion of our business, which is not very large, where somebody will hire us to do optimization of their network. They’re not buying our optimization software. They want us to come in and optimize their network. Sometimes they will hire us to do managed services on an ongoing basis. There are services like that, but there are no services where we are building custom modules of our software. >>>

Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Atul Jain: Since then, we have become a global company. Today, we are about 1,300 employees and doing about $175 million in revenue. We are global with 50% of our revenue coming from outside of North America.

Sramana Mitra: Your target customer base is still telecom?

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about?

Atul Jain: We did our first acquisition in 2006 when we were around $20 million. Over time, we have done five acquisitions and this year, our revenue is going to be about $180 million.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2006, you bring in another $5 million of revenue with an acquisition and then you launch this analytics product into your existing customer base. What did that do to your revenue?

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