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Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long have you sold the service?

Stephanie Leffler: We started in January 2011 – about five years.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about how this services business ramped up. Amazon was sending you people. You were managing their larger Mechanical Turk project using your platform. Did all leads come from Amazon or did you start marketing yourself?

Stephanie Leffler: In the beginning, all leads came from Amazon. We did start marketing ourselves. It’s funny. Thinking through the entrepreneurial journey, we found ourselves in a position where we never understood how good we had it in our first business with people searching online, finding exactly >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 4)

Stephanie Leffler: I remember Amazon called us about a year into this project and said, “How are you pushing so much work through Mechanical Turk?” We said, “We built this software platform to manage it, so it’s really easy for us to push a lot of work out there.” They asked us to come out and demo it for them. They were very impressed and said, “We’re trying to build a partner channel for this product. We need software providers like this to make our product more usable. Have you guys ever thought about going into business and selling the software?”

At that time we were like, “No, we’ve done the software thing. We’re in this thing now where you can just make money through advertising revenue. You don’t need to have any customers.” Two to three months later, we couldn’t get it out of our head. As our product got better and better, we thought that this is something that could actually impact the future of work. >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All this was organically built or did you raise any financing in this process?

Stephanie Leffler: We didn’t raise any financing. We’re both very happy at this point that we didn’t. It wasn’t really by design but it was more because we didn’t even understand that those sort of things were available.

Sramana Mitra: How were you doing customer acquisition?

Stephanie Leffler: We got very good at search engine marketing. In Google, we ranked number one for the term shopping cart, shopping cart software, and e-commerce store. Every day, our sales line was a queue. Sales people would pick up the phone as fast as they could. It was all 100% inbound from our rankings in >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re going way too fast for the story. Remember, we are doing an Entrepreneur Journeys story.

Stephanie Leffler: The key portion of switching gears from trying to be a retail business to starting our e-commerce journey was out of complete necessity. We were in a situation where we didn’t have enough money to keep our retail business going. We didn’t have any plans to be profitable fast enough for us to be able to survive. It was a survival technique.

Sramana Mitra: As a survival strategy, you decided that you were going to become a reseller of this e-commerce platform company?

Stephanie Leffler: That’s exactly right.

Sramana Mitra: What price point was the platform priced at, and what was the reseller deal that you struck with them? >>>

Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 1)

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

Stephanie bootstrapped her first company to $20 million in revenue from St. Louis. Her second, also from St. Louis, is venture-funded and crossed $10 million in revenue last year. Awesome entrepreneur, inspiring woman!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Stephanie Leffler: I am from Northern Virginia in Fairfax. I was actually born and raised there. Ultimately, I went to school at Washington and Lee University. I found my way to St. Louis as part of my entrepreneurial journey. I’ve lived here ever since. >>>

Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? Is it a per user pricing model?

Karl Mehta: The pricing model is exactly like Salesforce or Slack. It’s a per user per month model. It’s close to $5 to $7 per user per month. It ratchets down with volume. If you have more than 10,000 employees, you get a pretty significant discount.

Sramana Mitra: When you start a significant account, what kind of deal size are you starting at? Is it $10,000 a month or $100,000? Where does the sales cycle begin?

Karl Mehta: Sales cycle begins with a very minimum commitment for as little as $5,000 a month. You get a pretty good experience of it and at the end of the month, you can either turn it off or add more users to it. >>>

Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: To what extent are your corporate clients specifying what areas they want learning content in, which then drives your strategy of finding people who can produce that content and deliver that content on your network?

Karl Mehta: When a corporate client sets up EdCast, they tell us the topics for which they set up channels. They will set up a channel on leadership or supply chain, for example. Those are all the topics that’s given to us. That goes into our content engine that brings either existing web content or it brings influencers that we know. Every enterprise has their own subject matter experts but they have not tapped into that. Our platform allows them to identify those subject matter experts. They can now share knowledge that is already sitting inside their company. That is a huge asset. >>>

Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is funded by Menlo?

Karl Mehta: Menlo was one of the investors, but the round was led by SoftBank Capital.

Sramana Mitra: What, in a nutshell, is the premise of EdCast?

Karl Mehta: EdCast is a knowledge network for anyone to develop lifelong learning as a passion. We have a knowledge economy and things are rapidly changing. In order to keep pace with whatever field that you’re working on, you want to get smarter every day. You need a network that is going to bring you the most personalized content in your field. Let’s say you’re into learning Big Data or even non-technology, you can go to EdCast and follow a channel on architecture, for example. >>>