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Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given that you know nothing about me and you’re showing me something that doesn’t work for me at all, how do you take a prospect like me and turn me into somebody who can actually find useful things on your site?

Jeremy Young: You would have to give us your email address and create an account. The way we’re doing it is through our proprietary engine. It is our strategic focus for the year and you’re going to see some amazing things come out of it over 2016.

Sramana Mitra: Why, as somebody landing on your site, would I want to give you my email address?

Jeremy Young: A lot of our traffic comes from affiliates and partners that are pushing you to a specific deal. When you come, you are already looking for those particular deals and you want to buy it. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I presume you guys started the company with your own money?

Robert Moore: We did. It was not a lot of money. It was about $10,000 in total between the two of us.

Sramana Mitra: Who built the software? Who wrote the code?

Robert Moore: I wrote the original version in my attic. We didn’t have enough money to stay in New York. For the first nine months of the company, we ran it out of my attic. I coded all day, everyday, and Jake was making pre-sales.

Sramana Mitra: You were working off of your own experience and you understood  the problem at a pretty visceral level, but you still needed some anchor customers to get going with. Who were those? >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There is a company that we have done a case study on in Utah called Steals.com that’s in the baby product category and that does one deal a day.

Jeremy Young: Exactly. This was before any of those companies existed. We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now.

Sramana Mitra: When you started this, did you have the partnership with the other website right from the beginning?

Jeremy Young: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That was your primary customer acquisition strategy?

Jeremy Young: Correct. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 7)

Nick Hedges: At the same time, the current CEO was facing unfortunate circumstances. Two weeks after he joined the company, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He spent two years as the CEO of Velocity, or Leads360 as it was called then. All the time, he and I knew that he was not going to be the CEO forever. The only good thing was that I was lined up for succession very early in his tenure. That’s partly why I was promoted so quickly to a number of different roles and how I ended up becoming the CEO of Velocify.

Sramana Mitra: How has revenue been tracking in this period that we are talking about?

Nick Hedges: We grew at 40% to 60% from the time that I’ve been at Velocify. That’s year-on-year growth. Growth accelerated in 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger that accelerated that growth? >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 1)

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

True to the 1M/1M mantra, here is yet another story of a high-growth SaaS company that was bootstrapped first, and then has gone on to raise $22 million.

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

Robert Moore: I was born in Annapolis, Maryland but actually grew up and spent the majority of my childhood in a town called Glassboro, New Jersey, which is in southern New Jersey. My journey really begins in high school where I started my first business and really fell in love with entrepreneurship. Everything grew out of that.

Sramana Mitra: Did you go to college or did you start your business right out of high school? >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 5)

Jeremy Young: The second company was called Uberplay. That was a company that was going to take the best games out of Europe and trying to get the license for English-speaking markets, produce these games in China or Europe, and distribute them in the United States. We went over there and signed a lot of contracts. We produced 50 different SKUs. Some of these games were in Game of the Year in Germany. It sold millions of copies over there and we had the rights for the American market.

I went to Toy Fair and tried to get distribution. When you go to a Walmart and say, “This game has sold two million copies in the past year in Germany. We want you to put it on your shelf.” They’ll say, “That’s great, but you’re going to bring in 5,000 copies of this game. It’s going to sell for 10% through in one week or you’re going to take them all back. We want a million dollars worth of advertising expense to put towards this.”

I was being a little naive thinking that I had this great product that would resonate with everyone because it resonated well with Europe. With our distribution channels, they were not open for new products. You had to pay to play. I decided to try through online and social media. We were growing and it was selling, but it was super hard to make any money. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What triggered the telephony piece? What is the telephony functionality from a use case point of view?

Nick Hedges: It does a large number of things. One of the things is that it allows you to work very efficiently through an optimized list. If you look at what a typical salesperson does in a normal CRM, they go to a lead or an opportunity, read the information, decide whether they’re gong to call it, and then they make the call. After the call finishes, they need to figure out who they’re going to call next.

With our system, we have the prioritised list and you can just move from one lead to the next quickly and efficiently, always knowing that whoever you’re going to be calling next is the opportunity that is the highest priority to call. The other thing that it does is that it solves the number one issue in inbound sales. When you generate leads, whether that comes through your marketing automation system, straight from your website, or from third parties, the number one thing that determines whether you’re going to convert that lead is how quickly you call it. There’s just a very high correlation between the two. >>>

Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your involvement in that company and how long you were involved in that company.

Jeremy Young: I was involved for probably a couple of years. I ended up selling my interest back to them.

Sramana Mitra: In what capacity?

Jeremy Young: I came to them with the idea. They did the programming. I did the marketing. We had terms of service not to allow certain types of websites. Everyday, I’d go in there and find certain websites that were breaking the rules. It was just the three of us. We had our hands in everything at that time.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us up to what? 2001 to 2011 timeframe? >>>