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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 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. >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were on the team at this point when you were going through this?

Jonny Nicol: Six months earlier, there were 16 people. I actually let people go before we ran out of money, which was painful. Then there were eight of us. It wasn’t actually the case that they could work completely for free, because I still had to pay some bills. Everybody came to me with a number they absolutely had to have to pay rent. Most people were using their savings.

It turned out that we needed at least $60,000 to keep the company going. I went to my bank who’ve obviously seen me through this journey as an army officer rather than an entrepreneur. They said, “We’ll give you this loan unsecured.” That was a personal loan to me. I went out and we got through. I got a phone call for Citizen >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize here. You got about $800,000 from these hedge fund guys. Let’s call it angel financing. What year was that?

Jonny Nicol: It ended up at $1.6 million. That was 2013.

Sramana Mitra: You had already run this company with your own money for three years before you got the angel financing?

Jonny Nicol: It started in 2011, so it was for two years. >>>

From Solo Entrepreneur to $65 Million in Revenue: Brazilian Entrepreneur Daniel Scandian, CEO of MadeiraMadeira (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you need to a raise more money or are you planning to now keep growing organically?

Daniel Scandian: Now, we are breaking even. Last year, we achieved $65 million in revenue and we plan to reach around $150 million in 2017. We are cash flow positive now. Just now, we are building another business plan to talk with some new investors. Now it’s more of an option. We don’t need the money to grow, but we have some opportunity in Brazil to expand into other categories and also to invest more in technology.

Sramana Mitra: This whole $65 million going to $150 million is an entirely Brazilian market-facing business?

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