Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did your friend put in?

Jonny Grubin: He put in £45,000, which for me felt like a huge amount of money.

Sramana Mitra: What exactly where you able to prove in that MVP? I’m so used to constantly working with people’s pitches. As you were speaking, one thing that struck me is you almost have two ideas in there. One is this idea that for people in urban areas where theft is higher and there’s no safe space to leave something. That is a real delivery problem.

Best of Bootstrapping: A Serial Bootstrapping Entrepreneur’s Journey

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

Going against the grain of Venture Capital mania, in 1999, Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik started his second bootstrapped venture. When we spoke in 2017, 18 years later, he was still running it.

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?

Aviram Jenik: I was born and raised in Israel. I moved to California about 10 years ago. I spent most of my adult life in Israel. I studied at the Technion which is like MIT in Israel. We half-jokingly say that pretty much everyone can say that they went to the top 10 universities in Israel because there are less than 10 universities. I’m an entrepreneur by background. I started my first company, which was bootstrapped when I was about 19.

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Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 3)

Jonny Grubin: I wrote to a couple of friends and we launched an MVP. People couldn’t do anything with SoPost, but it allowed me to test the concept. In December 2012, we launched a website where you could sign up with your email address. You could add some delivery addresses and create a schedule, but you couldn’t do anything off the back of it.

Sramana Mitra: You said you worked with a couple of friends. You also had this paycheck that was still going when you started this company. Can you take me to that very beginning before you launched an MVP when you decided to restart? How long did you keep that other job?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 1)

Jonny started as a solo entrepreneur, bootstrapped with a paycheck, and has built a $15M+ revenue global business with a small amount of funding. Excellent story!

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?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped SproutLoud to $30M from Florida

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

SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman shared his wonderful bootstrapping story with me in 2017.

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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a Finance and Marketing concentration. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an investment bank in the online media practice. That’s the quick summary of my initial upbringing.

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size from your direct customers?

Paresh Patel: It’s very skewed. We have customers whose deal sizes are in the millions. We also have deal sizes that are in the hundreds or thousands. We have customers that have more than a hundred thousand machines with us. Then we have customers that are buying 50 machines. It varies quite a bit.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do another financing round?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too many positions that didn’t really need to be hired for yet.

Sramana Mitra: Series A is more about how to build the product and how to sell the product.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine?

Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert it into a modern mobile machine.

Sramana Mitra: A million and a half worth of orders were from how many customers?‘