Bootstraps First to $5M ARR, Raises $10M Later: Toucan Toco CEO Charles Miglietti (Part 1)

French entrepreneur Charles Miglietti tells the story of how he has bootstrapped first to $5M and then closed a $10M round recently.

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 a Tech Company by an English Major: Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9 (Part 1)

Kevin has done an excellent job of bootstrapping his tech company without a tech background.

Inspiring story for many in his shoes.

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?

Best of Bootstrapping: Discussing the Journey Through Failure to Success

Entrepreneurs love to discuss success. Few are willing to discuss what they tried and failed at. Robly CEO Adam Robinson does a terrific job of sharing his journey through various failed experiments to a model that is now gaining traction.

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?

Adam Robinson: I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I went to Rice University. I graduated in 2003. One of my friends had an internship at Goldman-Sachs the year before.

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Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue level in 2016 at the point at which you introduced this homegrown CRM system?

Sardor Umrdinov: $10 million.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were providing technicians for various appliances. Why do you need all these software developers?

Sardor Umrdinov: Our lead generation is through website and SEO. We do SEO locally. We pipeline those leads to our CRM. You couldn’t do it with other CRMs, so we had to build our own. It was expensive to do it here.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 1)

Sardor has bootstrapped a marketplace of home appliance technicians to over $10 million in revenue. Great story.

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 $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I know you are above $5 million in revenue. Do you want to provide any metric beyond that? Any more granularity?

Richard Hoehn: We’re quite a bit more than $5 million. We did $33.6 million last year. We’re number two, fastest growing company in the United States on Inc 5000.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Did you reach this level of revenue purely on the strength of heavy manufacturing? How did the vertical and geographical strategy change?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Richard Hoehn: Now we got some money and start ramping into sales. You also got the whole complexity of managing this money. What we do is, we aggregate and pay the carriers. If we have a client and we save them money on a specific carrier like FedEx, FedEx sends us a bill.