Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 1)

Colin’s company has to compete with Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, and Apttus with a bootstrapped business. Read on to learn how he does so.

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?

Colin Earl: I was born in London and raised to be an engineer. I graduated from Imperial College. I came to Silicon Valley three years later. >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 1)

We’ve been covering new niche brands that have successfully been built either purely with e-commerce or with an online-offline combination. Yogibo is a bean bags company that has scaled nicely in its niche.

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?

Eyal Levy: I was born and raised in one of the suburbs of Tel Aviv. I was raised in a family of entrepreneurs. My father was an entrepreneur. He founded a plastic company. My maternal grandfather was also an entrepreneur. He had a toy factory. Since I was ten years old, I was helping out. I would spend half of the summer vacation >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One of the results of this increased competition is that Google keyword pricing goes up significantly.

Ricky Joshi: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a high-ticket item, so I suppose you have lots of headroom to spend on customer acquisition. Still, everybody in that space does have that kind of headroom, so the bidding war must be tremendous.

Ricky Joshi: It comes back to building the business and being an early mover. Because we were early, we were able to test and learn what worked. We were >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that from your Google PPC, you would target only the region that is close to your manufacturing and distribution centers?

Ricky Joshi: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How much of this did you launch with in 2011?

Ricky Joshi: Are you asking which market?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling your own branded mattress? All this calculation that you did about the raw materials, did it lead you to the decision to do your own branded mattress?

Ricky Joshi: We were always going to create our own brand. That was part of the whole operation. You look at the history of the Internet. You have a lot of resellers that came on early on. My part of the research showed that all they’re really doing is providing a different delivery system for the same product and experience.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not entirely true, right? There are companies that have differentiated positioning. >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: 2010 was when you decided to launch the company.

Ron Rudzin: That’s correct.

Ricky Joshi: It was a soft launch. We got kickstarted towards the tail-end of 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the very beginning. What is a soft launch? What were you doing in 2010? What were you trying to do to validate or get your ducks lined up? >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 1)

Ron and Ricky have built a luxury mattress brand online. Learn how.

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?

Ricky Joshi: I’m from Columbus, Ohio and went to Dartmouth for undergraduate. I went on to get my MBA from Columbia. I dabbled in various entrepreneurial activities and worked in the agency world as an Internet guru in IPG. My big claim to fame was sourcing and leading our investment into Facebook in 2006. I managed a $10 million business development deal there. I ended up creating my own agency and becoming a co-founder of Saatva. >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many private jet operator companies are out there?

Jonny Nicol: In the US, there are 3,300 private jet companies, which have a thing called 135 accreditation. That’s a legal FAA requirement to be a charter company. We deal with only 500 of them because we want to make sure that we’re only dealing with the very best companies.

Sramana Mitra: Globally, how many companies are we talking? What is the total number of players?

Jonny Nicol: In Europe, there’re 1,300. We’re probably talking around 7,000.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a relatively fragmented market and you had to pull all this into your system to be able to operate with all of them. >>>