Featured Videos

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How far did that take you? What were you able to do with that model?

Josh Manion: I described that as it was enough to survive but that was about it. That got us to maybe $100,000 in revenue. It wasn’t much.

Sramana Mitra: It was you and your wife at that point?

Josh Manion: Yes. If you think about the growth of that, we struggled along in that state for couple of years where I would describe it as if you’re an entrepreneur and you started a services business, you go on this yo-yo of feast or famine. You’re either selling or delivering. If you’re delivering, you’ve got money but not time to sell. If you’re selling, you’ve got plenty of time to sell but generally no money. You’re oscillating between those two things. >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why do these people want to join your company instead of doing research? What are you seeing as the driver for getting these people?

Andy Gotshalk: I think it’s a personality type. Most PhD’s get their PhD and want to continue in academics and research, but there are people that want to have, what they tell us, more of an impact in their daily lives. It could be through selling this technology to people to help improve their research, getting this technology to a point where it’s actually going to start affecting patient’s lives, helping researchers discover new applications for it, or being a part of the company and developing some of the new company. It’s a different track for them. It’s difficult for us to find good sales people in this business.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine it’s a very specialized personality type that can interact with science at that level and have the skills to sell, which typically do not go together. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying?

Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made the change, we would send traffic from Facebook to blogs at PetFlow. These blogs were mostly pet-related content but around that content were advertisements. Those advertisement were helping us pay the bills and get us to profitability.

Sramana Mitra: What is the scale of the Facebook traffic that allowed you to do this?

Joe Speiser: Over the four years that we built out the audience, I think we had a million fans on Facebook. We had a really strong following. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: She’s also from the Midwest?

Josh Manion: Yes, she’s from the Chicago area. We settled around Chicago in the western suburbs. I took a quick job with a network technology bar. That didn’t work out very well. That was nine months of craziness. Their business wasn’t doing well in the post dot-com world.

After about nine months of that, my wife and I decided to found a company called Stratigent. Because we barely knew what we were doing, we decided that we would do analytics consulting. It’s something that I had developed some expertise in back at Myteam.com. My perception was the timing would be very good because it was all about accountability and bringing some rigor back into marketing that had maybe slipped away briefly during the dot-com days.

Sramana Mitra: What did you decide to do in terms of your own idea? >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 4)

Andy Gotshalk: We started the business in 2008 and raised a little bit of money. Pretty soon, we became profitable. From 2008 to 2012, we grew our revenue from that million dollar starting point up close to $8 million or $9 million.

Sramana Mitra: From $7 million starting point, you said?

Andy Gotshalk: From $1 million. It’s from about $750,000 initially and we grew that to almost $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: Let me get the specifics there. That is the journey that we should be focusing on. The $1 million revenue was based on the work that you did before the spin-off?

Andy Gotshalk: Correct. That was based on the work when we were at Cyberkinetics. In 2008, we became Blackrock Microsystems. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin.

Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes away most of it. Then, you also have incidental things like materials and software to run the warehouse. Before you know it, there’s a re-haul and you take a big step back. There’s a lot of things that go into it.

That being said, we knew that we wanted to scale this business fast and we needed more money for advertising to do it. We raised a round with Lightspeed Ventures in 2011. I think it was July. With that money, we were able to bring on additional help. We hired Mike. He’s now our President. He’s been promoted multiple times throughout the last few years. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 1)

Josh is a fellow MIT alum, and a fellow believer in the tried and true methodology that we espouse in 1M/1M: Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later. Josh raised his Series A with $5M in revenue. The company today is growing at 150% year-over-year. Wonderful story!

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

Josh Manion: I grew up in a little town in Wisconsin called Jamesville, which had about 50,000 people. My dad delivered little snack cakes to grocery stores and stocked the shelves with them. My mom ran a store. It was a Midwest upbringing. The unique element for me was that I was actually homeschooled all the way through high school. That afforded me some unique latitude to pursue some of the things that I’m passionate about. One of which is chess, which I took to some extreme. I actually played as a professional chess player for a couple of years before going to college. I have one sister three years older than me. >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 3)

Andy Gotshalk: This technology was invented at the University of Utah, so our company is in Salt Lake City because of that. There was another professor at the University of Utah who had a strong business mind, which you don’t find too often. He was heavily involved in developing new advanced parts of the same technology and trying to innovate it. He saw an opportunity to basically buy this business as Cyberkinetics was about to go out of business and actually build a strong company that was dedicated to neuroscientists.

I had talked to him about this idea. He knew my experience. He basically asked me to move from Boston to Salt Lake City and run the company. To me, it was a great idea. It’s on the track of what I wanted to do in terms of growing these businesses and trying to get a product that was going to impact people. We took a step back and said, “We’re going to focus on technology first and then we’re going to focus on getting it into the market.” To me, what it said is, “We’re going to build a strong sustainable company, which is going to help us put this platform that is going to be long-lasting”. >>>