Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All this is developed by Eric and your Vietnamese developer?

Mary Oemig: We now have a much bigger team. The original was developed by someone who left. We couldn’t continue to pay him and has come back. Eric and Zach were our early developers. We now have about five US-based engineers with one in Indiana, one in Wyoming, and the rest in Seattle.

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is a membership fee?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping OnBoard from the US Midwest

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

Co-founder and CEO Paroon Chadha has bootstrapped Passageways from Indiana, now doing business as OnBoard based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he wants to help other regional entrepreneurs succeed. Along the way, he has pivoted from licensed software to cloud software, and made other strategic decisions that helped his company become more successful. Read our conversation from 2019 to learn more on his moves.

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

Paroon Chadha: I was born in Chandigarh, India. I was born to a family of entrepreneurs. Growing up, the choices basically boiled down to being an engineer and then perhaps being an entrepreneur. I went to Punjab Engineering College and found myself a little bit at odds with technical internships that I did and felt like sales was my true calling. It was mostly influenced by some of my mentors in life. My dad ran businesses. It led me to join a sales job out of engineering. My first job was at Wipro. I sourced hardware and software solutions for two years in India. That’s how it started.

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Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the 2012 to 2018 period, you were moonlighting and being creative with your bootstrapping. Was it just you and Eric?

Mary Oemig: Yes. Starting in 2016, we paid for a developer in Vietnam. We trusted the provider. We felt comfortable with the pricing. They gave us an early discount.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenues at that point?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping The Intern Group to $13M

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

I’m very bullish about market opportunities that are large enough to build sizable businesses but not large enough such that VCs end up funding numerous competing companies. This case study – my interview with David Lloyd, Co-founder and CEO of The Intern Group – shows you how a niche player with a $150 million TAM is growing nicely without outside financing.

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?

David Lloyd: I’m from the UK. I was born in London. I spent the first 22 years of my life in London before spending approximately the last 10 years of my life between London and Latin America.

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Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 2)

Mary Oemig: We did what I would recommend to every single entrepreneur – a lot of listening tours. We talked to our future customers. We talked to teachers. We learned that teachers were trying to hire developers around the world to turn what they knew into games. They were losing a lot of money doing it, because they didn’t know how to manage developers.

We realized in the end that what we should develop is a creation platform with a student play platform based on best-in-breed knowledge about what you need to know about student performance in order to inform good next decisions about what to teach next. We trust that teachers know what content needs to be taught.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrap Using Services

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

As I started analyzing various paths to success via bootstrapping, a second formula also became absolutely obvious: doing services projects and then formulating a product through that process. We gave this a name: Bootstrapping with Services, and published a book on the subject, Bootstrapping Using Services.

Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek financing get rejected. The seed capital gap leaves many entrepreneurs struggling to get their businesses off the ground. Bootstrapping, a tried-and-true method to self-fund a business, is a must to bridge this gap in seed funding. And offering a service is one of the best ways to bootstrap. When I turn the spotlight on entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their ventures using services, please note that, in many cases, these same entrepreneurs later raised venture capital. Through my interviews, I aim to give you a seat at the table with successful entrepreneurs and synthesizes what is learned to provide information and inspiration for everyone looking to take their business concepts to the next level.

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Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 1)

Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story!

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?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Niche E-commerce Company to $20M

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

Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how CEO Brian Lim built iHeartRaves.

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?

Brian Lim: I was raised in LA County. My parents immigrated here to escape communism in China and Cambodia. I grew up very poor. We bootstrapped our company back in 2010 with $100 and turned it into a $20 million a year company.

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