Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before you quit your day job, what was the timeframe between your coming up with this idea, deciding to start this company, and quitting your job?

Suuchi Ramesh: The idea took shape about 18 months before I quit my day job. By that time, Suuchi Inc became really tangible. It was in the second quarter of 2016 when we signed on our first few customers. I quit my day job at the end of 2016.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 1)

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

This is a wonderful bootstrapping with a paycheck story of a really smart, scrappy entrepreneur.

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?

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your funding strategy? We talked about the $2.2 million round. What else have you done since then?

Rich Waldron: We’ve raised a total of $109 million now. We raised a $5 million bridge to a Series A. In 2016, we raised our Series A which was $14 million in March of 2018. Then last year, we did our Series B and Series C just under four months of each other.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your go-to market strategy. What has worked? What turned out to be the repeatable customer acquisition strategy?

Rich Waldron: For a long time, we were relying on partner referrals. To this day, they still make up a healthy portion of our go-to market. To really stand on your own feet, you need to control your own destiny in terms of customer acquisition.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you raised money, what did you have?

Rich Waldron: We raised a $2.2 million round in December of 2014. That was the first institutional check. Prior to that, we had some capital from the accelerators and we raised a small angel round off the back of that.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you have at this point when you were raising this $2.2 million?

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 4)

Rich Waldron: Deep down, we weren’t that passionate about solving email. Email wasn’t a thing we had a problem with. We were being pushed to think through how you want to spend the next 20 years of your life.

Some of the bad traits from Europe that we’d picked up is pitching ideas that we thought would get funded and would perhaps lead to a quick exit than being something that genuinely moved you.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 3)

Rich Waldron: There was one person who really liked us. The reason was, as a team, there is a clear CTO, a business person, and a product/CEO type. We had an interesting balance of skill sets. We were technically savvy. We were able to produce and build the things that we wanted to.

Even if our idea wasn’t necessarily in the right ballpark, we had real determination and a scrappy culture about us. They liked the fact that we weren’t prepared to quit. We kept plowing on.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later to $120M from Colorado: Madwire CEO JB Kellogg (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2019?

JB Kellogg: We built the third version and released at the end of 2019. We’re excited about that because it truly makes us more of a technology company than we’ve ever been. Now we have do-it-yourself (DIY) functionality, and not just do-it-for-me (DIFM).