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Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea in that business plan that you were signing up for?

Will Fleming: The original idea was to introduce a unique product to certain types of retailers with an emphasis on convenience store chains, drug store chains, and grocery chains. The thought was that we would start with two particular products and then we would expand the products, and eventually have a large and diversified basket of products. That wasn’t exactly the way it went. The first product was called Zipster. It was a fully automated postage centre that never really got to market. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There’s an electronic integration that you were able to put in place with these distributors?

Steve Annese: Yes, there was only one distributor at that time.

Sramana Mitra: They were electronically and sufficiently together to be able to establish that bridge with you.

Steve Annese: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Steve Annese: It was towards the end of 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2006? >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 1)

Will and his partner started with a somewhat flawed business idea, but has successfully built up to a $50M company.

Along the way, pivots had to happen, and are still happening. Interesting study in customer-driven strategy.

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

Will Fleming: I was born in New York City and moved around a bit as a child. The first lengthy stop was my grade school years. That was probably, in retrospect, the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. Although of course, I couldn’t know it at that time. One of my favourite entrepreneurial memories of the grade school years was when I was 9 years old. There was a magazine I got called Boy’s Life. I found an advertisement at the back of the magazine and I wrote to them to receive a whole bunch of flower seeds. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much inventory did you take on and how did you source that inventory? This is one of the key questions for every bootstrapped e-commerce entrepreneur.

Steven Annese: When I first started, I didn’t take any inventory on. I basically had a drop shop agreement with a major distributor at that time that distributed probably around 20 main brands of lighting, and they were very familiar with the lighting showrooms in the US. I didn’t have to take on any inventory which was a much bigger advantage than stocking a garage full of inventory. You have to also understand that when I launched, I launched with about 20,000 SKUs. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you know anything about the lighting business?

Steven Annese: I didn’t but my sister was working at a lighting distributor. She told me that there were some companies that were trying to do business with them in the online world. That’s actually where my lead came from so I have to thank my sister.

Sramana Mitra: For educating you in this business.

Steven Annese: For both. Before I spoke to my sister, I was looking at several products. I was looking into importing my own products from China or another country. I looked at India. I looked at possibly bringing my own product line. I got into a conversation with her and she said, “There are a couple of people looking to do lighting. Did you look at lighting?” That was the time that I looked at lighting and I saw that the competition wasn’t so fierce. I started looking into that and I started asking her questions. She started educating me on the topics. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 1)

I’ve always been bullish about niche e-commerce. Here’s yet another story of an entrepreneur who has successfully bootstrapped a company in high-end light fixtures.

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?

Steven Annese: I’m a child of an Italian immigrant. I was born in New Jersey. It was in the 70s when most of the Italians migrated.

Sramana Mitra: What about college?

Steven Annese: University was interesting. I wanted to migrate somewhere out west or south. Unfortunately, since my parents were immigrant, they didn’t want me to leave the house. So I had to go to school locally. I attended St. Peters University in Jersey City. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the new product, and how did you identify the new product definition? How did you achieve product market fit?

Ryan Stolte: Through this relationship we had and the amount of breadth of customers that we were exposed to, we did get in front of a lot of these customers. They would say, “That was great what you did there. I have tremendous visibility into that product. Here’s my real problem.” These roots as a problem solver and consultancy never left us—staying close to our customers and really listening to their problems and pain. We had the opportunity to uncover what the new pains were.

At this time in 2010, there was this giant amount of security data and people didn’t really know what to do with it. For each one of these breaches, the raw data is there. People were having a very difficult time turning that raw data into something that they should actually do in order to improve their security. Back in 2010, working with a very large financial organization, we got to this point where people were trying to answer top line business level questions. They’d say, “I have a huge amount of people handling sensitive data every single day. My security systems are generating lots of noise about what those people are doing. Here’s what I need from you. I need you to take all that noise away and I need 50 people a day. I don’t care where you get the data.” >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you price this new product?

Feris Rifai: The original OEM agreement started out as a royalty fee. The Symantec folks were selling it directly to the client. That grew from there to cover more of the Symantec portfolio of products. It also grew to Symantec actually including it in their product portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: Your go-to-market strategy for this product was an OEM business model?

Feris Rifai: That’s exactly right. That helped us fund our own ambition on the R&D side. Back to your point about services companies transitioning into product companies, that actually continued to help us drive that growth because we were able to use a much larger organisation’s sales force to sell our product.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you continue in this OEM mode? >>>