Bootstrapping a Niche e-Commerce Company to $20 Million: iHeartRaves CEO Brian Lim (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it a glove that you’re selling? I’m trying to understand the form factor of the product that you’re selling here.

Brian Lim: They’re white stretch gloves with LED lights at their fingertips. The technology is much more advanced than what we had before. Today you can program these lights using a Bluetooth phone and you can customize through millions of colors and flashing colors.

Sramana Mitra: How do you get this off the ground as a business? I understand the genesis of how it came about. You had this passion. How did the business side came about? >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche e-Commerce Company to $20 Million: iHeartRaves CEO Brian Lim (Part 1)

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

Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how Brian built iHeartRaves.

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?

Brian Lim: I was born in LA County. My parents immigrated here to escape communism in China and Cambodia. I grew up very poor. We bootstrapped our company back in 2010 with $100 and turned it into a $20 million a year company. >>>

Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did your VCs react on the topic of a virtual company?

Fred Plais: This divides people a lot. The world is changing. People are starting to buy the story more and more. We need the same engineers at Google today. We’re doing some complex things on cloud. It requires some extremely experienced people. If you are trying to hire them from Silicon Valley, we would not find the talent. It would be too hard.

The reason is to be able to take talents where they are. We find talents at a good price. We pay at market price. That balance is one of the reasons why, today, we are one of the few technology companies that doesn’t have a recruitment firm. >>>

Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your first financing was US financing?

Fred Plais: It was financed by French and Finnish VCs. It’s difficult when you’re pivoting. You get a business that’s not going that fast anymore and you get another one which is picking up. You need to reinvent everything. Financial investors have a timeline. They’ve been supportive. We’ve been financed by the European Commission. They have an R&D program called Edge2020 that is well-funded. They finance companies that have lots of R&D.

We received a grant from them. It’s a very competitive process. They grant only 1.5% of the companies that apply. All the companies that apply are already doing business. We got €2 million. >>>

Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model for this product?

Fred Plais: It’s a yearly subscription which includes the old product. You’re getting your hosting part of the subscription but you also get all the DevOps workflow that comes with this. For a price starting at $15,000 per year, you get hosting capabilities, 24/7 support, all DevOps work flow without restrictions.

You can have as many staging environments as you want and deploy as frequently as you need. What we see for people that are taking the subscription is they deploy 10 times more than what they deployed before. That’s a huge improvement. You save a lot of time as well. >>>

Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2015, you decided to create this cloud stack. Then you started getting traction with other customers like Magento. How did you get to that? What gave you the idea of building that stack?

Fred Plais: We were involved in several e-commerce projects where things were failing because of DevOps. It was always that the infrastructure was not there. Developers were doing great. We thought there was an opportunity here. We tried to think of what would be the product that we would want to use in the infrastructure.

The one thing that we’ve done is make staging environments that are exactly the same as the production website. We worked for three years on >>>

Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to need to double-click on that. What do you actually provide? My understanding is that Magento is a hosted e-commerce platform.

Fred Plais: Exactly. When you take a look at what a development team on the web is, you’re going to have 3 to 4 people that are managing the servers. Out of 10, it’s four people. We basically automate everything around managing those services on the platform so they can refocus on building the right experience.

They can focus on the UI. They can focus on things that are relevant to the end users. They don’t need to manage all the pieces around infrastructure because we automate everything for them. We make it extremely simple with the right abstractions for them to handle those services. >>>

Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 4)

Ram Palaniappan: Once we got that algorithm, we were able to expand it to salaried workers as well. Another thing that was interesting was, when I started, I was pushing money out over ACH. It shows up in the employee’s bank account the next day. Over time, we integrated with every ATM and debit network in the country.

Today, when a customer asks for money, the money shows up in their bank account in less than a second. That has been opening up a lot of use cases for us. While people are in line at Walgreens, they can cash out their earnings. There have been a lot of product improvements that have opened up the market and made the product experience much better. We also raised more money along the way. >>>