Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was Sift a funded company or a bootstrapped company?

Jeff Wilkins: It was a funded company but by angel investors only. We had a pretty modest round. I think we raised less than $1.5 million for the business. We have investors like Eric Smith, Michael Harrison, and some of the Justice League of America in tech. 

We didn’t go the formal VC route. We were growing and profitable and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. 24/7 was similar to DoubleClick.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How many years did you stay at Sun and what happens next?

Jeff Wilkins: I spent three and a half years at Sun. I got a call from a colleague who had been working on creating a new medical instrument. It was pretty much serendipitous. He essentially said, “I’ve got this idea for a product. I need help on the business side. Can you come?” I went down and ran this company, EyeSys Technologies, for two years.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili (Part 1)

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

Jeff has turned $1M of personal investment (with his Co-Founder) to $80 million in revenue. Pretty capital-efficient, this entrepreneur’s journey!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with where your story begins. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeff Wilkins: I grew on the East Coast. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington DC and moved around a lot as a kid. I spend time in Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You’re obviously list-building for email marketing on behalf of these aggressive marketeers. Does this mean that this list can also be used to market through MailChimp or Eloqua?

Adam Robinson: This is my vision right now. What we’re doing right now is, we’re updating all of our marketing pages to communicate this message that we’re a mid-market ESP. Our differentiator is this Robly ID technology.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You got this $3 million cash cow. You had other people running it. You didn’t have to spend time on it and it gave you cash with which you could do other things.

Adam Robinson: Yes, that’s great to have but it’s not that exciting. I had been building this lead.com product. I went down to Argentina. Tate was the sole developer the entire time. We never had anybody else. We wanted to hire a team.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey Through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your analysis of the gap in MailChimp’s story where you could actually come in and do something?

Adam Robinson: What I had observed over the years is that people had success doing very narrow things. I’m sure you’ve heard of this guy Nathan Barry at ConvertKit. He has the perfect tool for bloggers. He went from zero to a million a month in 36 months.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 4)

Adam Robinson: After hiring agencies to try do Facebook marketing, none of them worked because our product wasn’t good enough. It was only good enough for this uncompetitive channel. We had to do stuff that MailChimp isn’t doing. I didn’t want anything like the freemium model because they’re doing that.

The company which I cannot name got acquired. The acquirer chopped this partner business they had. They spent $50 million in building it. I wasn’t quite sure about the economics of it. After it got chopped, the guy who put it together reached out to me.

Candid Discussion of a Bootstrapper’s Journey through Failures to Success: Robly CEO Adam Robinson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you pause a moment there and explain why you were able to deliver these enhanced open rates? What was the trick in that?

Adam Robinson: It wasn’t actually the rate. We just aimed for 50% more opens. We built an automation tool where we sent your campaign out. After sending the mails, a little window comes up where you can change the subject line.