From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, were you charging for the product?

Anthony Smith: We were not. Anybody could install Insightly and start using it. I was still at Perth in Western Australia. A lot of Google’s customers were based in the US which is a 12-hour time difference. A lot of stuff was happening in the middle of the night for me. My email system was blowing up. There were a lot of people inquiring about it, submitting bugs, and needing technical support and help. I was doing a lot of work from 9PM through to 6AM.

Sramana Mitra: How many downloads did you get and how many of these were active users? >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model.

Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing during the day. Some of them might use a computer for half an hour after they finish the shift or after they’ve finished with a customer. They’re not sitting in front a computer all day and using this software as part of the job. It’s more of an add-on piece that helps them orchestrate some of their activities. >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company?

Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining company. I spent about 18 months there and built that out. We got to the point where the mining company was really happy with it and started rolling it out.

In the history of computing, there have been about three really big >>>

From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)

Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story!

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?

Anthony Smith: I was born in a very small town of Hamilton in the northern part of New Zealand. It’s famous for its cows and

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Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors?

JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our marketing. We have to be very ruthless with measuring our return on ad spend.

If it’s not profitable, it just doesn’t work. We have to constantly move and reevaluate where we’re spending our money. We started opening stores and we have to be more scrappy where we measure all these things carefully. Our goal is to make sure >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory?

JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends, social media, and doing some Google AdWords.

Customer service was critical to the whole experience. We did very well on that. We would follow up with every single customer and get feedback as to what they didn’t like. We used that to iterate on the product. That drove down our return rate and drove up >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)

JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm, medium firm, medium soft. We wanted to just make one. Is it possible that most people actually need the same stuff?

We take that formula and offer that at a fair price, which was easy to do by going direct. We don’t have to have as big a margin because we’re not selling it to a store that marks it up again. We can operate at a much better price. We’re simplifying the process. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)

Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital.

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?

JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix, but I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to Penn State. That’s where I met my co-founder, Daehee Park. From there, my career took me to Silicon Valley working for several startups. That’s where my co-founder and I stuck together. We were >>>