Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale did each of these businesses reach? Are we talking million of dollars in revenue?

Angie Stocklin: To be honest, it was hundreds of thousands. A couple of the brands were in the tens of thousands. Anything that was over a million, we kept.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about the divestiture process. When you decided that you don’t want to move forward with that business, what is the process of divesting each of them?

Angie Stocklin: That’s a great question. It changed over the years. The bigger the brands got, the more complicated the process got. When we divested the diapers website, we used an outside party to help us with the transaction. The transaction was fairly straightforward and easy. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about other businesses. How much did you buy the reading glasses for? How did that ramp?

Angie Stocklin: We ended up just buying a domain. It was not a great domain. It was readingglassesshopper.com. It’s a mouthful. I think we purchased it for $2,500. We were able to leverage a lot of the same suppliers to purchase reading glasses. There was a lot of synergy there.

Sramana Mitra: That one makes perfect sense. The diaper one didn’t make perfect sense.

Angie Stocklin: We had some missteps along the way. That’s for sure.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get rid of the diaper one?

Angie Stocklin: We sold it to a lady in Florida who was trying to quit her job and work from home. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There is a company that we have done a case study on in Utah called Steals.com that’s in the baby product category and that does one deal a day.

Jeremy Young: Exactly. This was before any of those companies existed. We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now.

Sramana Mitra: When you started this, did you have the partnership with the other website right from the beginning?

Jeremy Young: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That was your primary customer acquisition strategy?

Jeremy Young: Correct. >>>

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 a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you say B2B, what kind of B2B? Did you go after commercial? Did you go after restaurants?

Steven Annese: We did a lot of things. We instituted a pro-trade account. If you were a contractor or designer, you could basically sign up for our account. Once we scan the application and verify that you are a legitimate business, we would approve you. You would automatically be qualified for contractor pricing, which is a lot less than when you go to these big electrical supply houses. In fact, we have supplied to some of the big electrical supply houses. We still do today because they don’t have certain lines that we do. We facilitate that for them.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue split as you went into 2010 or 2011? How did the revenue emerge between B2B and B2C? >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It looks like that at the end of 2006, you were back to being able to have multiple distributors for your business and were able to get back to your top ranking in Google bids. Is that correct?

Steven Annese: Correct, in Google and Yahoo!. That was probably about 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What else happened in 2007?

Steven Annese: Between 2007 and 2009, we started building volume and focusing on key brands. At that point, I was probably open direct with about 70% of the manufacturers that we sold.

Sramana Mitra: Where was the revenue at this point?

Steven Annese: Revenue in 2009 was probably about a million.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next major inflection points between 2009 and 2015? >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There’s an electronic integration that you were able to put in place with these distributors?

Steve Annese: Yes, there was only one distributor at that time.

Sramana Mitra: They were electronically and sufficiently together to be able to establish that bridge with you.

Steve Annese: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Steve Annese: It was towards the end of 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2006? >>>