Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise funds at the Techstars demo day or did you raise funds afterwards?

Ryan Farley: Most of it was afterwards. We pieced together a round of a lot of individual angel investors. We didn’t have any VC funds in the million-dollar round. One of the 20 angel investors came from demo day. The rest came from our network or the Tech Stars network. Demo day is a great event, but it’s not like when you do your presentation, investors come running to you. That’s when the work begins; not when it ends.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise at this point? >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 1)

SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman shared his wonderful bootstrapping story with me in 2017.

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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a Finance and Marketing concentration. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing Tech Stars in Austin?

Ryan Farley: Yes. We were with 10 other companies that were all just incredible. It was something that we hadn’t seen before within entrepreneurial circles. We felt like, “How the heck did we get in?” The program was an awesome experience.

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn at Tech Stars?

Ryan Farley: A lot. They almost take your focus away from the company a little bit to teach you general business skills like sales, >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you launch it in a particular geography?

Ryan Farley: We did it in one county in the Washington DC metro area.

Sramana Mitra: Is that where you’re from?

Ryan Farley: I’m from close by.

Sramana Mitra: That was your local county. >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are we talking about a marketplace model? What is the business model?

Ryan Farley: It’s a transactional model. We process all the payments and we pay the service providers. It makes it a lot easier for them. The lawn service providers are going to make more money through our platform and it allows them to move their own customers to our platform because we take care of so much of the administrative overhead. >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 1)

As you know from our prior coverage, we like niche two-sided marketplaces a lot. Here’s another one to study. Please note, this company went through TechStars, and had a validated business before getting into TechStars, as we have seen in several other case studies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Ryan Farley: I grew up in Washington DC metro area. I went to school at Virginia Tech for Mechanical Engineering. I >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money?

Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had popped up over the four years prior to my starting the business. We had a lot of traction with small business customers around the world. We also worked hard to make sure that they were having a good experience on the platform and encouraging them to leave reviews in the Microsoft marketplace or the Google marketplace and incentivize telling their friends.

As a freemium product, that helped us gain some early traction over some of the paid-only options in the market. I did feel that >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users?

Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had set a benchmark offering of $4.95 per user per month for an incredible amount of value. We felt we couldn’t go too much above that. We started off around about $12.95 per user per month.

When we started offering that to customers, we offered a higher level of support but not necessarily more features. At that point in >>>