Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we step through the journey. 

Neal Taparia: When we started working on it full-time, I had mentioned that we benefited from a lot of organic growth. What was really interesting is as we focused on it full-time, we were able to understand all these ways to increase ad revenue.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of metrics before we go on to the post-Lehman story. What kind of revenues were you making in college? What kind of revenues were you making from the company while you were working at Lehman?

Neal Taparia: In college, we were probably making around $30,000 a year. It was nothing crazy. By the time we were at Lehman, the growth continued. We were lucky to see strong organic growth with the site even though we weren’t focused on it full-time at that point.

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 3)

Nishant Shah: In 2017, we were very aggressive in acquiring new customers. That’s when our marketing strategy changed a lot. From just one channel, now we have multiple channels. We came in with affiliates, email marketing, and display marketing. We had a much larger budget allocated to marketing versus almost nothing. That helped a lot.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of team, how do you run this company now?

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If they came to your site, what would they do?

Neal Taparia: They would go there when they’re writing papers to start documenting their information. We had launched this site after putting it together over two months. Students would go there.

Say they were using Catcher in the Rye, all they would have to do is put in the title of the book or other bibliographic information. We would structure and cite it for them.

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the insight in terms of customer acquisition for instance? What clicked?

Nishant Shah: When you’re growing the business and you’re bootstrapping it, it always depends on how much money you have. You want to spend more on marketing because you want to grow that way, but you have to have your infrastructure in place.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 1)

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

We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. This is a wonderful one.

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?

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 1)

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

In these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times.

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?

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about how you built the pieces of the business. Let’s talk about the retail e-commerce piece. It sounds like there is inventory involved. Did you finance the inventory through some bank, or did you just do it organically?

Sina Khanifar: That’s where seed capital came in. We didn’t need any financing.