Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital (Part 1)

Ryan has built a portfolio of bootstrapped businesses over the last 25 years that adds up to over $50M in revenue. He discusses the strategies and nuances, pivots and positioning, and more.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Right. What else do you want to share with me?

Justin Grooms: I just want to share how excited I am for where I think commerce is going around identity. So much has changed in e-commerce over the last decade, but one of the things that hasn’t changed too much, unfortunately, is curated, specialized shopping experiences.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. So, the customer, however, has to do the first sale for Bolt to kick in.

Justin Grooms: The customer needs to create a Bolt account somewhere in our network.

Sramana Mitra: The customer acquires the consumer. And then connects into the Bolt network and then Bolt provides additional identity data and more marketability to that customer. But the customer acquisition is happening at the retailer.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk me through the business model evolution of the business? This is probably before your time, but when the company was selling the checkout software, were they charging on a Software as a Service basis?

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, Bolt started with a software product for online checkouts and sold it to small retailers. Small retailers came on board and used Bolt as their e-commerce checkout system. Then when consumers were buying through the Bolt checkout process, they were offered the opportunity to join the Bolt network.

This is how Bolt developed this network of consumers and then gradually went upmarket and got larger and larger retailers to come into this checkout system and also access the consumer base of Bolt. That’s the story that you’re telling.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the technology that were you bringing to market with Bolt? What were you looking for commercialization?

Justin Grooms: We had an initial all-in-one checkout product that we were selling to SMB merchants. Bolt had good success with that.

Sramana Mitra: A point-of-sale checkout product?

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left Datron? Why did you leave Datron? To build something else? A startup?

Justin Grooms: When I was in the defense space, I had a lot of exposure to some early research that was being done in spatial computing, and I thought that it was just such a fascinating technology.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 1)

Bolt is doing something unique in e-commerce personalization. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Justin, let’s start at the very beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? Raised? What kind of background?