12 Udemy Courses with Entrepreneurship Case Studies

Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life.

For me, this journey began as a graduate student at MIT in 1994. The world watched Netscape go public that spring, and the Internet swept over us like a virus. As I wrote my Masters thesis, I also wrote my first business plan. We were, as a generation, shaping the Internet during those early years, and, my degree in hand, I was ready to jump into the unknown – from then on really, I have been jumping into unknowns at every turn.

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of jobs were you doing?

Vanessa Jeswani: I was doing marketing consulting, primarily for a PR firm.

Kish Vasnani: I was doing a lot of sales and business development work for a marketing agency. They had a lot of inbound interest but never had anyone take those leads and develop them further. It was about 10 to 20 hours of work. I didn’t even get paid for that. I made a deal with the owner. I said, “I’ll dedicate this much time. Can you please pay for my and Vanessa’s insurance?”

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was Nomad Lane started as an Etsy store?

Vanessa Jeswani: It was called something else. When we noticed that it was travel-related items that were kicking off, we rebranded it to Nomad Lane.

Sramana Mitra: This was 2016?

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 1)

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

Kish and Vanessa bootstrapped to multi-million dollars in revenue selling a private label product before quitting their job. In this story, you also get to see the nuances of running successful (and not so successful) crowdfunding campaigns. Very interesting journey and insights.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That positioning is sharp and well-defined. Does that continue to be your sweet spot?

James Cramer: It continues to be the biggest line share. It is where we focus the most. What we added that expanded our market was partnerships. We sought professional services automation platforms that targeted the same customers knowing that they don’t have our functionality. If they did, we partnered with them and added a competitive differentiation in that deal.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Three out of the fifteen customers you started the process with converted into customers. What kind of average deal size did they convert at?

James Cramer: The initial deal size was maybe $50,000 to $75,000 in ARR.

Sramana Mitra: What time frame are we talking about?

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me how you went about it. You used the lesson that you learned on bootstrapping using services. Tell me more about how you applied that principle to this business.

James Cramer: The first thing that we did was, we got into a room with a whiteboard. It was just the two of us. Because we are such experts in this topic, we thought that we would give it a week or two and we will have this thing all white boarded out, and we’ll have a good model of what the problem is and the corresponding solution. We can then start building.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the acquisition happen?

James Cramer: We would occasionally get solicitations from bankers. We would always entertain it to get a sense of which company was worth it and what was going on in terms of acquisitions. One day, I got an email from a banker in New York that said, “I have a client that is looking to make an acquisition in the United States for a company that had these criteria.”